Represent Sinatra

This microservice works in companion with the REPresent application, providing a contact point to API services to gather information on United States representatives, senators, bills, votes and news articles.

Getting Started

• Click "Fork" in the upper right hand corner of the page
• Follow instructions below:

git clone [email protected]:YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE/represent-sinatra.git
cd represent-sinatra
- bundle install
- bundle update

Installing

To set up the service, you'll need API keys from Propublica and NewsAPI. In order to set up the API keys, you'll need to run:

bundle exec figaro install

Once it has successfully run, you'll need to access the config/application.yml file. Inside the file, post the two keys like so:

PROPUBLICA_API_KEY: <YOUR_KEY_HERE>
NEWS_API_KEY: <YOUR_KEY_HERE>

You should then be able to run the service locally using localhost:4567

Caution:

The '/bills' endpoint is very call-intensive on the Propublica API, because of the amount of data it collects. Use sparingly, as it is easy to rate-limit your API key with it. It will also take some time to run, thanks to the amount of calls.

Endpoints

• /representatives

  • This endpoint retrieves biographical information from active members of the United States House of Representatives. The returned values are:

    First name	Last name	Congressional ID	Date of birth	Gender
    Political party	Leadership role (if any)	Twitter account (official)	Facebook account (official)	GovTrack ID
    Official website URL	Contact form URL	Cook PVI	DW-NOMINATE score	Office location
    Time last updated	Phone	State	District	At-Large
    Total votes made	Missed votes	Percentage of missed votes	Votes with party	Votes against party

• /senators

  • This endpoint retrieves biographical information from active members of the United States Senate. The returned values are:

    First name	Last name	Congressional ID	Date of birth	Gender
    Political party	Leadership role (if any)	Twitter account (official)	Facebook account (official)	GovTrack ID
    Official website URL	Contact form URL	DW-NOMINATE score	Next election year	Office location
    Time last updated	Phone	State	Senate class	State rank (junior or senior)
    Total votes made	Missed votes	Percentage of missed votes	Votes with party	Votes against party

• /articles

  • This endpoint retrieves news articles for requested members of Congress. The parameters are:
    • A comma separated list of members
    • The sorting methodology ('relevance', for example)
    • The language, using an abbreviation ('en' for English, for example)
    • The number of articles requested
  • The returned values are:

    Source	Title	Description	Article URL	Date published

• /bills

  • This endpoint retrieves the bills that have gone up for a passage vote in Congress in the current congressional session.

  • The returned values are:

    Short title	Primary subject	Short summary
    Bill ID	House roll call	House session
    Congress bill URL	Senate roll call	Senate session

• /chamber_votes

  • This endpoint retrieves the number of different types of roll call votes that have been performed over the course of the current congressional session. The parameter is:
    • The chamber in question ('house' or 'senate')
  • The returned values are a filtered list of key-value pairs between the type of vote and how many of those there were. For example, votes for passing a bill will be labeled "On Passage", and will have a value for how many passage votes for bills have been made.

• /member_votes

  • This endpoint retrieves the vote from a particular member of Congress on a particular roll call vote. The parameters are:
    • The Congressional ID of the member in question
    • The chamber in which the member sits ('house' or 'senate')
    • The session in which the vote occurred (Each two-year Congress is split into 2 sessions, one for each year. '1' is the first session, over the course of an odd number year - for example, 2019, and '2' is the second session occuring during an even number year - for example, 2020)
    • The roll call vote number in question (This is sequential, starting from 1 at the beginning of each session, for every vote that involves the entire chamber)
  • The returned value is the member's vote, i.e. "Yes" or "No" (or if they missed the vote)

• /images

  • This endpoint retrieves an image url from a repository containing official portaits of US Congress members. It returns a default if one is missing. The parameter is:
    • The Congressional ID of the member in question
  • The returned value is the URL of the photo or the URL of the default, if none is located.

Built With

• Ruby
• Sinatra

Authors

• Antonio Jackson (https://github.com/AntonioJacksonII)
• Rostam Mahabadi (https://github.com/Rostammahabadi)
• Derek Borski (https://github.com/dborski)
• Alex Pariseau (https://github.com/arpariseau)