ordering m2m query based on through table

I am trying to configure a m2m relationship to be ordered based on data in the through table. I assumed an 'order' attribute in the through-table's Meta class would be honored, but it's not. Bug #11850 (closed: wontfix) relates to this problem, but with no pointer as to a work-around.

As custom ordering would seem a prime use case for a custom through class on m2m relations, I'm surprised how hard it is.

In my case, I'm trying to order digital assets (eg sheet music) into a number of folios (collections). Music can appear in several collections. Order is manually specified for each collection. An attribute in a custom through table is a natural solution, but it doesn't work.

Other examples which come to mind: Authors and books, or songs and composers. Since books are alphabetized by lead author, the order matters. And we wouldn't want Django to list "Lennon & McCartney" songs  as "McCartney & Lennon"

Anyway, how is the best way to crack this nut? After studying `db.models.related` I tried building a custom manager on the related class, and override the `get_query_set` method to look for the through attribute on the manager to update the ordered_by clause. No luck -- but with prefetch interaction, this seems pretty fragile in any case.

Thanks for any help.

Kent.

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