Showing the description of a choice in a Django template

Sometimes you would like to show the description of a choice instead of its code in a Django template.  One way to achieve that is to define a property in the model and referencing it in a template as below:

    {{ object.status_desc }}

=== models.py ===

from django.db.models import IntegerField, CharField, Model

class Invoice(Model):

    STATUS_TYPE = (
        ('A', 'Active'),
        ('I', 'Inactive'),
    )

    invoice_no = IntegerField()
    status = CharField(max_length=1, choices=STATUS_TYPE, default='A')

    @property
    def status_desc(self):
        return dict(self.STATUS_TYPE)[self.status]
 

EDITED 2015-07-13 Turn out there is a django function for this purpose: Model.get_FOO_display()