In django, how do I sort a model on a field and then get the last item?

Question

Specifically, I have a model that has a field like this

pub_date = models.DateField(\"date published\")

I want to be able to easily grab the ob

Answer 1

Be careful of using

Edition.objects.order_by('-pub_date')[0]

as you might be indexing an empty QuerySet. I'm not sure what the correct Pythonic approach is, but the simplest would be to wrap it in an if/else or try/catch:

try:
    last = Edition.objects.order_by('-pub_date')[0]
except IndexError:
    # Didn't find anything...

But, as @Harley said, when you're ordering by date, latest() is the djangonic way to do it.