Parliament Data API Wrapper (Ruby)

parliament-ruby is a gem created by the Parliamentary Digital Service to allow easy communication with the internal parliament data api.

NOTE: This gem is in active development and is likely to change at short notice. It is not recommended that you use this in any production environment.

Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
  • Setting up a connection
    • Setting a base URL 'globally'
  • Building an 'endpoint'
    • What's #get?
• Getting Started with Development
  • Running the tests
• Contributing
• License

Requirements

parliament-ruby requires the following:

• Ruby - click here for the exact version
• Bundler

Installation

This gem is currently not available on RubyGems. To use it in an application, install it directly from GitHub via your Gemfile

gem 'parliament', git: 'https://github.com/ukparliament/parliament-ruby.git', branch: 'master'

Usage

This gem's main function is fetching an n-triple file from a remote server and converting it into linked ruby objects.

Setting up a connection

In order to connect to a remote server, we first need to set a base_url value, from which we will build an 'endpoint'. The base_url should be the beginning of a url without the trailing slash. For example http://example.com instead of http://example.com/.

parliament = Parliament::Request.new(base_url: 'http://test.com')

Setting a base URL 'globally'

Within code you can set a global base URL using the following snippet.

Parliament::Request.base_url = 'http://test.com'

# The base_url should be set for all new objects
Parliament::Request.new.base_url #=> 'http://test.com'

# You can still override the base_url on an instance by instance basis
Parliament::Request.new(base_url: 'http://example.com').base_url #=> 'http://example.com'

Alternatively, you can set the environment variable PARLIAMENT_BASE_URL on your machine and we will automatically use that.

ENV['PARLIAMENT_BASE_URL'] #=> 'http://example.com'

Parliament::Request.base_url #=> nil

Parliament::Request.new.base_url #=> 'http://example.com'

Building an 'endpoint'

Now that we have a base_url set, we will want to build an 'endpoint' such as: http://test.com/parties/current.

An endpoint is effectively just a full URL to an n-triple file on a remote server.

Building an endpoint is simple, once you have a Parliament::Request object, you do something like this:

parliament = Parliament::Request.new(base_url: 'http://test.com') #=>  #<Parliament::Request>

# target endpoint: 'http://test.com/parties/current'
parliament.parties.current.get

# target endpoint: 'http://test.com/parties/123/people/current'
parliament.parties('123').people.current.get

# target endpoint: 'http://test.com/people/123/letters/456'
parliament.people('123').letters('456').get

What's #get?

Once you've built your endpoint (parliament.people.current), we use the #get method to tell us you're finished building and ready to get the data.

Getting Started with Development

To clone the repository and set up the dependencies, run the following:

git clone https://github.com/ukparliament/parliament-ruby.git
cd parliament-ruby
bundle install

Running the tests

We use RSpec as our testing framework and tests can be run using:

bundle exec rake

Contributing

If you wish to submit a bug fix or feature, you can create a pull request and it will be merged pending a code review.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Ensure your changes are tested using Rspec
6. Create a new Pull Request

License

parliament-ruby is licensed under the Open Parliament Licence.