I’m still making progress towards getting my app, Scale Shuffle, ready to submit to the App Store. (The app displays a random scale as a music practice tool.) Today I spent some time making sure it looks good (or at least ok) at various text scaling sizes. This required changes to every screen. At first I thought I was going to have to lose the icons on the Resources screen, and then my friend Ben pointed me towards the documentation for the Dynamic Type Size environmental variable.

I ran into an issue using Django’s {% regroup %} template tag where sometimes a group would be shown twice. It turns out that I needed to use the dictsort filter on the object list, as noted in the documentation, becasue I didn’t have the model ordered by the property I was grouping on.

Here’s the example from the documentation:

{% regroup cities|dictsort:"country" by country as country_list %}

In my case, I needed to filter by a property of the related model:

{% regroup employee.request_set.year|dictsort:"request_type.name" by request_type as type_list %}

For the same project I previously posted the custom model manager for, I needed to get a list of just the years for all the entries in a queryset. After a bit of experimentation and going down a few dead alleys, I found my answer in the excellent Django documentation, with the .dates() method.