What's the neatest way of getting dictionary entries in a specified order?

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Chris Green writes:

> I have a fairly simple application that populates a GUI window with
> fields from a database table.  The fields are defined/configured by a
> dictionary as follows:-
>
>     # 
>     # 
>     # Address Book field details, dictionary key is the database column 
>     # 
>     dbcol = {}
>     dbcol['firstname'] = col('First Name', True, False)
>     dbcol['lastname'] = col('Last Name', True, False)
>     dbcol['email'] = col('E-Mail', True, True)
>     dbcol['phone'] = col('Phone', True, True)
>     dbcol['mobile'] = col('Mobile', True, True)
>     dbcol['address'] = col('Address', True, False)
>     dbcol['town'] = col('Town/City', True, False)
>     dbcol['county'] = col('County/Region', True, False)
>     dbcol['postcode'] = col('PostCode', True, False)
>     dbcol['country'] = col('Country', True, False)
>     dbcol['notes'] = col('Notes', True, False)
>     dbcol['www'] = col('Web Page', True, True)
>     dbcol['categories'] = col('Categories', True, True)
>
> How can I get the fields in the GUI window in the order I want rather
> than the fairly random order that they appear in at the moment?

Look up OrderedDict in the collections module.