chapeau/kepi/bowler_pub/models/README.md

Kepi's models

Kepi uses django-polymorphic models to represent ActivityPub messages.

The superclass is Object. It has some important subclasses:

• Activity is the superclass of all activities, such as Create and Like.
• Actor is the superclass of all actors, such as Person.
• Item is the superclass of Notes and so on. (These don't have a superclass other than Object in the spec, so Item is a name you'll only see here.)

Object used to be called Thing, in case people confused it with Python's own object class. But now it's Object with a capital O. You will still find some references to it as "thing", though.

Objects represent ActivityPub types, which are dicts. Therefore, Objects have fields. The fields may be stored in various ways:

• As a field of the Object itself, prefixed with f_. The prefix allows us to have fields such as type, which is a Python reserved word.
• In a ThingField which refers to the Object. The values of a ThingField are stored as JSON, so they can be arbitrary.
• Anything else the Object makes up, as long as it can provide it to accessors.

Object fields may be read and written via subscripting (e.g. foo['type']. You may append flags to the argument separated by double underscores. I will document these flags at some point.

All Objects have an activity_form property which returns their representation as a dict.