When ordering a Django QuerySet, you might want rows with empty values to appear last. With NULL values, you’d use nulls_last=True—but CharFields typically store empty strings, not NULL.

The Problem

Django’s documentation recommends avoiding null=True for string-based fields. Empty values should be stored as empty strings "", not NULL.

But nulls_last=True only works with actual NULL values:

# This won't push empty strings to the end
queryset.order_by(F("title").asc(nulls_last=True))

The Solution

Use NullIf to convert empty strings to NULL for ordering purposes:

from django.db.models import Value
from django.db.models.functions import NullIf

queryset.order_by(
    NullIf("title", Value("")).asc(nulls_last=True),
    "name",
)

NullIf("title", Value("")) returns NULL when the title equals an empty string, otherwise returns the title. Combined with nulls_last=True, empty titles sort to the end.

How It Works

The NullIf function takes two arguments and returns NULL if they’re equal:

NullIf(expression, Value(""))
# Returns NULL if expression == ""
# Returns expression otherwise

This only affects the ordering—your actual data stays unchanged as empty strings.