Are stripe objects dicts?

[oTree-org]

When reading the docs about subscriptions, customers, etc., I sometimes see attribute notation, like

subscription.tax_percent = 10

And sometimes see dict notation, like subscription['items']['data'][0].id, and sometimes see a mix (e.g. in the previous example why not use ['id'] at the end?)

What is the difference between the two? I was wondering if I could use dict notation all the way, like subscription['items']['data'][0]['id']. That means in my tests using unittest.mock I could patch the return values of create, retrieve, etc. using simple dict literals.

(By the way the docs have examples on how to use stripe-python, but I can't find any general explanation of how stripe-python is works, e.g. what data types it uses and how those map to JSON responses.)

Thanks!

[jleclanche]

stripe-python uses a custom dict object which supports lua/js-like behaviour of getting/setting keys through python attributes.

In dj-stripe we try to treat them purely as dict. It's more consistent.

[oTree-org]

Thanks!

[ob-stripe]

@oTree-org @jleclanche is correct, stripe-python's objects are indeed dicts with some additional magic to support dot notation.

The reason the documentation uses the [] notation when accessing items is that, because the objects are dicts, subscription.items returns the items() function rather than the value associated with the 'items' key. So in this specific instance, using the dict notation is required.