Wagtail Inline Panel - Sort Order - django

Question

So I'm struggling with ordering the choices within an InlinePanel (for an orderable) on my site. In the admin page, when adding a new item, the options are presented in the order they were added to the site (so, essentially the 'id' for that item); this is less than ideal considering there are hundreds of options presented in a manner that is not user friendly.
I'm assuming this needs to be defined as ordering meta within the orderable, but I can't seem to get it to work. This is what my orderable looks like:
class RelatedPeople(Orderable):
service = ParentalKey('service.Services', related_name='related_person')
person = models.ForeignKey('person.People', null=True, on_delete=models.SET_NULL, related_name='related_service')
panels = [
FieldPanel('person')
]
I've tried the following with no success:
class Meta:
ordering = 'person'
and, trying to append the field within 'person' that I want to sort by, 'name':
class Meta:
ordering = 'person.name'
There must be an obvious way to solve this that I'm over looking. A default sort order of the 'id' (in this case, for 'person.People') is rarely ever going to be suitable from the perspective of the content creator.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Rob

Answer 1

Person model should have:
ordering = ['name']
instead of
ordering = 'name'
And your Orderable object should have it's meta changed to
class Meta(Orderable.Meta):
Via Django Docs, this is the example of abstract base classes, and ordering:
Meta and multi-table inheritance¶
In the multi-table inheritance situation, it doesn’t make sense for a
child class to inherit from its parent’s Meta class. All the Meta
options have already been applied to the parent class and applying
them again would normally only lead to contradictory behavior (this is
in contrast with the abstract base class case, where the base class
doesn’t exist in its own right).
So a child model does not have access to its parent’s Meta class.
However, there are a few limited cases where the child inherits
behavior from the parent: if the child does not specify an ordering
attribute or a get_latest_by attribute, it will inherit these from its
parent.
If the parent has an ordering and you don’t want the child to have any
natural ordering, you can explicitly disable it:
class ChildModel(ParentModel):
# ...
class Meta:
# Remove parent's ordering effect
ordering = []
When an abstract base class is created, Django makes any Meta inner
class you declared in the base class available as an attribute. If a
child class does not declare its own Meta class, it will inherit the
parent’s Meta. If the child wants to extend the parent’s Meta class,
it can subclass it. For example:
from django.db import models
class CommonInfo(models.Model):
# ...
class Meta:
abstract = True
ordering = ['name']
class Student(CommonInfo):
# ...
class Meta(CommonInfo.Meta):
db_table = 'student_info'

Answer 2

I am not familiar with Wagtail, but can you take a look at this issue :
https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/issues/4477#issuecomment-382277375
Update:
Maybe you just need to update your Person model like this:
class Person(models.Model):
...
class Meta:
ordering = 'name'
In your files, you try to order RelatedPeople by Person, but what you need is to order the Person list by name in your wagtail dropdown