Building an api for django activity stream with Generic Foreign Keys

I wanted to build a django-rest-framework api for interacting with django-activity-stream. Activity stream uses Generic Foreign Keys heavily which aren’t naturally supported. We can however reuse existing serializers and nest the data conditionally.

Here is a ModelSerializer for activity steam’s Action model.

from rest_framework import serializers
from actstream.models import Action
from myapp.models import ThingA, ThingB
from myapp.serializers import ThingASerializer, ThingBSerializer

class GenericRelatedField(serializers.Field):
    def to_representation(self, value):
        if isinstance(value, ThingA):
            return ThingASerializer(value).data
        if isinstance(value, ThingB):
            return ThingBSerializer(value).data
        # Not found - return string.
        return str(value)

class ActionSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    actor = GenericRelatedField(read_only=True)
    target = GenericRelatedField(read_only=True)
    action_object = GenericRelatedField(read_only=True)

    class Meta:
        model = Action

GenericRelatedField will check if the value is an instance of a known Model and assign it the appropriate serializer.

Next we can use a viewset for displaying Actions. Since activity stream uses querysets it’s pretty simple to integrate with a ModelViewSet. In my case I’m checking for a get parameter to determine whether we want all actions, actions of people the logged in user follows, or actions of the user. I added some filters on action and target content type too.

from rest_framework import viewsets
from actstream.models import user_stream, Action
from .serializers import ActionSerializer


class ActivityViewSet(viewsets.ReadOnlyModelViewSet):
    serializer_class = ActionSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        following = self.request.GET.get('following')
        if following and following != 'false' and following != '0':
            if following == 'myself':
                qs = user_stream(self.request.user, with_user_activity=True)
                return qs.filter(actor_object_id=self.request.user.id)
            else:  # Everyone else but me
                return user_stream(self.request.user)
        return Action.objects.all()

    filter_fields = (
        'actor_content_type', 'actor_content_type__model',
        'target_content_type', 'target_content_type__model',
    )

Here’s the end result, lots of nested data.