what is the point of 'timeline' in array or param for get_news_feed?

I went through all tutorials and docs which stream-django provided.

And there was one thing that I could't understand.

I can't find the differences between these feed_manager methods.

# (1)
feed = feed_manager.get_news_feed('timeline', request.id)
# (2)
feed = feed_manager.get_news_feed(request.id)['timeline']
# (3)
feed = feed_manager.get_news_feed(request.id)

Could you explain the difference? Are they doing exactly same thing? timeline means flat feed, then why do we put timeline in param?

Thank you

Solution

timeline is the name of the feed group that you've created within Stream.

Once you create a feed group in Stream, you'll select the type of feed group ("flat" in this case, but can also be "aggregated" or "notification"), then, you'll name the feed group - common names are timeline/news_feed (a homepage feed showing activity from other users) or profile/user (a profile page feed showing all activities from a single user). There are no "reserved" words in feed group names.

Re: whether or not these methods are all doing the same thing:

feed_manager.get_news_feed('timeline', request.id) (1) is definitely correct. It'll fetch the feed activities for the specific timeline:1234 feed, where 1234 is most likely your user's ID.
(2) and (3) I'm not sure about - it's likely that they're doing the same thing as (1), but I'm not able to tell at the first glance at the docs.

Hopefully that helps!