Btukfyl

I have a QStandardItemModel piped into a QTableView. One of the columns in my model contains dates which have user-friendly displayData and computer-friendly userData. So for example one QStandardItem might display a string like 22 Nov 2018 but the userdata would look like 324586 (seconds since the epoch). However when I sort the column it of course sorts by the displayData. How can I force the table to sort by userData instead?

You have to use setSortRole():

from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets

import random



DATECOLUMN = 1



class MainWindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):

    def __init__(self, parent=None):

        super(MainWindow, self).__init__(parent)

        self._tableView = QtWidgets.QTableView()

        self.setCentralWidget(self._tableView)



        self._model = QtGui.QStandardItemModel(10, 4) 

        self._tableView.setModel(self._model)



        now_second = QtCore.QDateTime.currentDateTime().toSecsSinceEpoch()

        for i in range(self._model.rowCount()):

            for j in range(self._model.columnCount()):

                if j == DATECOLUMN:

                    t = QtCore.QDateTime.fromSecsSinceEpoch(random.randint(0, now_second))

                    text = t.toString("dd MMM yyyy")

                    it = QtGui.QStandardItem(text)

                    it.setData(t.toSecsSinceEpoch(), QtCore.Qt.UserRole)

                else:

                    it = QtGui.QStandardItem("{}-{}".format(i, j))

                self._model.setItem(i, j, it)



        self._model.setSortRole(QtCore.Qt.UserRole)

        self._model.sort(DATECOLUMN, QtCore.Qt.AscendingOrder)



if __name__ == '__main__':

    import sys

    app = QtWidgets.QApplication(sys.argv)

    w = MainWindow()

    w.show()

    sys.exit(app.exec_())

Although I prefer to save the QDateTime directly and use a delegate to show the data with the format you want.

from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets

import random



DATECOLUMN = 1



class DateDelegate(QtWidgets.QStyledItemDelegate):

    def displayText(self, value, locale):

        return locale.toString(value, "dd MMM yyyy")



class MainWindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):

    def __init__(self, parent=None):

        super(MainWindow, self).__init__(parent)

        self._tableView = QtWidgets.QTableView()

        self.setCentralWidget(self._tableView)



        self._model = QtGui.QStandardItemModel(10, 4) 

        self._tableView.setModel(self._model)

        delegate = DateDelegate(self._tableView)

        self._tableView.setItemDelegateForColumn(DATECOLUMN, delegate)



        now_second = QtCore.QDateTime.currentDateTime().toSecsSinceEpoch()

        for i in range(self._model.rowCount()):

            for j in range(self._model.columnCount()):

                if j == DATECOLUMN:

                    t = QtCore.QDateTime.fromSecsSinceEpoch(random.randint(0, now_second))

                    it = QtGui.QStandardItem()

                    it.setData(t, QtCore.Qt.DisplayRole)

                else:

                    it = QtGui.QStandardItem("{}-{}".format(i, j))

                self._model.setItem(i, j, it)



        self._model.sort(DATECOLUMN, QtCore.Qt.AscendingOrder)



if __name__ == '__main__':

    import sys

    app = QtWidgets.QApplication(sys.argv)

    w = MainWindow()

    w.show()

    sys.exit(app.exec_())