These contracts define the minimum public output used by drmTMB's native reader journeys. They do not stabilize every component retained on fitted or summary objects for backward compatibility.
Details
check_drm() returns a drm_check data frame with the character columns
check, status, value, and message, in that order. Status values are
"ok", "note", "warning", or "error". Its "ok" attribute is TRUE
exactly when no row has status "warning" or "error".
summary() guarantees the reader tables coefficients, parameters,
covariance, and derived, plus the confint key. confint is NULL when
intervals were not requested and a table otherwise. Relayed sdpars,
corpars, ordinal, uncertainty, and mspl components remain available
for compatibility but are outside this stable reader contract.
For ranef(), terms is the stable model-scale conditional-deviation
interface on ordinary distributional and named structured-effect blocks.
It is not a random-effect standard-deviation extractor. values, latent,
covariance_blocks, and specialised mesh fields are advanced compatibility
components; covariance-block entries do not promise terms. A fit with no
random effects returns an empty list when dpar = NULL; requesting a named
block produces an error explaining that the fit contains no random effects.
fitted() is the response-summary interface, while predict_parameters()
is the distributional-component surface. For example, for a lognormal fit,
fitted() returns the arithmetic response mean exp(mu + sigma^2 / 2), not
the log-scale mu returned by predict_parameters(..., dpar = "mu").
In interval tables, conf.status reports the result or availability state,
interval_source records provenance, and profile.boundary is only a flag
that the relevant profile reached a boundary.