Sansad API

This is the code that powers the Sansad API.

Overview

The Sansad API has two parts:

• A light front end, written in Ruby using Sinatra.
• A back end of data scraping and loading tasks, written in Ruby.

The front end is essentially read-only. Its job is to translate an API call (the query string) into a single database query (usually to MongoDB), wrap the resulting JSON in a bit of pagination metadata, and return it to the user.

Endpoints and behavior are determined by introspecting on the classes defined in models/. These classes are also expected to define database indexes where applicable.

The front end tries to maintain as little model-specific logic as possible. There are a couple of exceptions made (like allowing disabling of pagination for /legislators) — but generally, adding a new endpoint is as simple as adding a model class.

The back end is a set of tasks (scripts) whose job is to write data to the collections those models refer to. All data is stored in MongoDB.

We currently manage these tasks via cron. A small task runner wraps each script in order to ensure any "reports" created along the way get emailed to admins, to catch errors, and to parse command line options.

While the front end and back end are mostly decoupled, many of them do use the definitions in models/ to save data (via Mongoid) and to manage duplicating "basic" fields about objects onto other objects.

The API never performs joins -- if data from one collection is expected to appear as a sub-field on another collection, it should be copied there during data loading.

Setup - Dependencies

If you don't have Bundler, install it:

gem install bundler

Then use Bundler to install the Ruby dependencies:

bundle install --local

The task to extract text from PDF documents of bills is performed through the docsplit gem. If you use a task that does this, you will need to install a system dependency, pdftotext.

On Linux:

sudo apt-get install poppler-data

Or on OS X:

brew install poppler

Setup - Configuration

Copy the example config files:

cp config/config.yml.example config/config.yml
cp config/mongoid.yml.example config/mongoid.yml
cp config.ru.example config.ru`

You don't need to edit these to get started in development, the defaults should work fine.

In production, you may wish to turn on the API key requirement, and add SMTP server details so that mail can be sent to admins and task owners.

Running tasks

The API uses rake to run data loading tasks, and various other API maintenance tasks.

Every directory in tasks/ generates an automatic rake task, like:

rake task:legislators

License

This project is licensed under the GPL v3.