In or-house-vis/history: History of the Oregon House of Representatives

Get House of Representatives chronology

Uses webdriver to interact with the Chief Clerks Office website to scrape the Chronological List of House Representatives.

Outputs data-raw/chronology-page.html

Required setup:

# install.packages("rstudio/webdriver")
# webdriver::install_phantomjs()
library(rvest)
library(tidyverse)
library(here)
library(webdriver)

Visit page and expand all sessions, save HTML

pjs <- run_phantomjs()
ses <- Session$new(port = pjs$port)

ses$go("https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/chief-clerk/Pages/representatives.aspx")
ses$takeScreenshot()

leg_sessions <- ses$findElements(xpath = "//td/a")
walk(leg_sessions, ~ .$click())

# this can take awhile so wait before getting source
html <- ses$getSource()
working <- str_detect(html, "Working on it")

while(working){
  Sys.sleep(5)
  html <- ses$getSource()
  working <- str_detect(html, "Working on it")
}
retrieved <- Sys.time()
retrieved_line <- paste0(
  "<!-- Retrieved ", 
  format(retrieved, "%F %T %Z"), 
  " -->"
)

write_lines(c(retrieved_line, html), here("data-raw", "chronology-page.html"))