getAllBios: Get several candidates' biographical information
In umatter/pvsR: Interact with the Project Vote Smart API for Scientific Research

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) References Examples

This function is essentially a wrapper around CandidateBio.getBio() specified for large amount of requests.

1	getAllBios(candidateId, batchsize=100, pause=0, backupfile="bios.list.Rdata")

`candidateId`	a character string or list of character strings with the candidate ID(s) (see references for details)
`batchsize`	numerical, indicating how many candidateIds should be processed in one batch (defaults to 100).
`pause`	numerical, indicating how long (in seconds) the download process should be paused after each batch (defaults to 0)
`backupfile`	character string for the path/file-name of the Rdata-file where the data should be saved (batch-wise) during the download process (default: "bios.list.Rdata").

This functions splits large requests into several batches. The requests are then processed batch-wise and are saved on the local disc to make sure that not too much RAM is assigned to the pvsR task.

A data frame with a row for each candidate and columns with the following variables describing the candidate:
bio.candidate.crpId (OpenSecrets ID),
bio.candidate.firstName,
bio.candidate.nickName,
bio.candidate.middleName,
bio.candidate.lastName,
bio.candidate.suffix,
bio.candidate.birthDate,
bio.candidate.birthPlace,
bio.candidate.pronunciation,
bio.candidate.gender,
bio.candidate.family,
bio.candidate.photo,
bio.candidate.homeCity,
bio.candidate.homeState,
bio.candidate.education,
bio.candidate.profession,
bio.candidate.political,
bio.candidate.religion,
bio.candidate.congMembership,
bio.candidate.orgMembership,
bio.candidate.specialMsg,
bio.office.parties,
bio.office.title,
bio.office.shortTitle,
bio.office.name,
bio.office.type,
bio.office.status,
bio.office.firstElect,
bio.office.lastElect,
bio.office.nextElect,
bio.office.termStart,
bio.office.termEnd,
bio.office.district,
bio.office.districtId,
bio.office.stateId,
bio.office.committee*.committeeId,
bio.office.committee*.committeeName,
bio.election*.office,
bio.election*.officeId,
bio.election*.officeType,
bio.election*.parties,
bio.election*.district,
bio.election*.districtId,
bio.election*.status,
bio.election*.ballotName.

Ulrich Matter <ulrich.matter-at-unibas.ch>

http://api.votesmart.org/docs/CandidateBio.html
Use Candidates.getByOfficeState(), Candidates.getByOfficeTypeState(), Candidates.getByLastname(), Candidates.getByLevenshtein(), Candidates.getByElection(), Candidates.getByDistrict() or Candidates.getByZip() to get a list of candidate IDs.
See also: Matter U, Stutzer A (2015) pvsR: An Open Source Interface to Big Data on the American Political Sphere. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0130501. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130501

# First, make sure your personal PVS API key is saved as an option
# (options("pvs.key" = "yourkey")) or in the pvs.key variable:
## Not run: pvs.key <- "yourkey"
# get all officials of a certain state
## Not run: officials <- Officials.getStatewide("FL")
# get all biographical information on those officials
## Not run: bios <- getAllBios(officials$candidateId[1:100], batchsize=20)
## Not run: head(bios)