View supported fields and methods

If you don’t know the capabilities of one of the objects you’ve got, you can call dir() on it. You’ll see all of its fields and all the custom methods it supports. Unfortunately, you’ll also see other launchpadlib-specific things you won’t need. For a more focused search experience, use these four lists:

  • lp_attributes: Data fields of this object. You can read from these and might be able to write to some of them.

  • lp_collections: List of launchpad objects associated with this object.

  • lp_entries: Other Launchpad objects associated with this one.

  • lp_operations: The names of Launchpad methods you can call on the object.

print(sorted(bug_one.lp_attributes))
# ['date_created', 'date_last_message', 'date_last_updated', ... 'tags', 'title']
print(sorted(bug_one.lp_operations))
# ['addAttachment', 'addWatch', 'subscribe', 'unsubscribe']

If you need more detailed help, you can look the object up in the API documentation. First, find out the type of the object. For example:

print(repr(bug_one))
# <bug at https://api.staging.launchpad.net/beta/bugs/1>

This is a ‘bug’ type object. Now you use the type of the object as an anchor in the API documentation URL. To find out the capabilities of this object and what data is stored inside it, you’d visit https://api.launchpad.net/devel.html#bug.

The API documentation is more geared towards web service hackers than launchpadlib users, but it will tell you about all of this object’s attributes and all the supported operations.

  • The “Default representation” section tells you about the available attributes.

  • The “Custom POST methods” and “Custom GET methods” sections tell you about methods the object supports other than the default methods described below. The methods take whatever parameters are listed in “Request query parameters”. (You can ignore the “ws.op” parameter because you’re using launchpadlib; that’s just the name of the method.)