title: Django ORM format date and check if less or equal to
body: <p>I'm using Django 1.5. I have created a generic function to fetch data from Database using ORM
  Currently I'm passing dictionary to this function to filter data. See the code below</p>
  
  <pre><code>objTable.objects.values(*listArg).filter(**dictFilter)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This working fine. Now i have a datetime field in one of the table. And i need to compare this against a date so i need a query like below </p>
  
  <pre><code>where DATE(start_date)&lt;= '2013-08-08'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Currently to check if the date less than or equal i will be passing a dictionary like</p>
  
  <pre><code>{'start_date__lte':datetime.date.today()}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Since 'start_date'  is a datetimefield its stores value like '2013-08-07 00:00:00' How can i format this field then use less than or equal ?</p>