activity.rst

Activity class

Activity is the core data in Feedly; their implementation follows the activitystream schema specification. An activity in Feedly is composed by an actor, a verb and an object; for example: "Geraldine posted a photo". The data stored in activities can be extended if necessary; depending on how you use feedly you might want to store some extra information or not. Here is a few good rule of thumbs to follow in case you are not sure wether some information should be stored in feedly:

Good choice:

1. Add a field used to perform aggregation (eg. object category)
2. You want to keep every piece of information needed to work with activities in feedly (eg. avoid database lookups)

Bad choice:

1. The data stored in the activity gets updated
2. The data requires lot of storage

Activity storage strategies

Activities are stored on feedly trying to maximise the benefits of the storage backend used.

When using the redis backend Feedly will keep data denormalized; activities are stored in a special storage (activity storage) and user feeds only keeps a reference (activity_id / serialization_id). This allow feedly to keep the (expensive) memory usage as low as possible.

When using Cassandra as storage feedly will denormalize activities; there is not an activity storage but instead every user feed will keep the complete activity. Doing so allow feedly to minimise the amount of Cassandra nodes to query when retrieving data or writing to feeds.

In both storages activities are always stored in feeds sorted by their creation time (aka Activity.serialization_id).

Extend the activity class

0.10.0

You can subclass the activity model to add your own methods. After you've created your own activity model you need to hook it up to the feed. An example follows below

from feedly.activity import Activity

# subclass the activity object
class CustomActivity(Activity):
    def mymethod():
        pass

# hookup the custom activity object to the Redis feed
class CustomFeed(RedisFeed):
    activity_class = CustomActivity

For aggregated feeds you can customize both the activity and the aggregated activity object. You can give this a try like this

from feedly.activity import AggregatedActivity

# define the custom aggregated activity
class CustomAggregated(AggregatedActivity):
    pass

# hook the custom classes up to the feed
class RedisCustomAggregatedFeed(RedisAggregatedFeed):
    activity_class = CustomActivity
    aggregated_activity_class = CustomAggregated

Activity serialization

Activity order and uniqueness

Aggregated activities