R/Votes.getByOfficial.R

In umatter/pvsR: Interact with the Project Vote Smart API for Scientific Research

##' Get all the bills an official has voted on by year
##' 
##' This function is a wrapper for the Votes.getByOfficial() method of the PVS API Votes class which dumps all the bills an official has voted on based on the candidateId and year. The function sends a request with this method to the PVS API for all candidate IDs and years given as a function input, extracts the XML values from the returned XML file(s) and returns them arranged in one data frame.
##' @usage Votes.getByOfficial(year, candidateId)
##' @param year a character string or list of character strings with the year(s)
##' @param candidateId a character string or list of character strings with the candidate ID(s) (see references for details)
##' @return A data frame with a row for each bill and columns with the following variables describing the bill:\cr bills.bill*.billId,\cr bills.bill*.billNumber,\cr bills.bill*.title,\cr bills.bill.categories.category*.categoryId,\cr bills.bill.categories.category*.name,\cr bills.bill*.officeId,\cr bills.bill*.office,\cr bills.bill*.vote,\cr bills.bill*.actionId,\cr bills.bill*.stage.
##' @references http://api.votesmart.org/docs/Votes.html\cr
##' Use Candidates.getByOfficeState(), Candidates.getByOfficeTypeState(), Candidates.getByLastname(), Candidates.getByLevenshtein(), Candidates.getByElection(), Candidates.getByDistrict() or Candidates.getByZip() to get a list of candidate IDs.
##' @author Ulrich Matter <ulrich.matter-at-unibas.ch>
##' @examples
##' # First, make sure your personal PVS API key is saved as an option
##' # (options("pvs.key" = "yourkey")) or in the pvs.key variable:
##' \dontrun{pvs.key <- "yourkey"}
##' # get additional biographical data on Barack Obama 
##' \dontrun{votes <- Votes.getByOfficial(as.list(2010:2012),9490)}
##' \dontrun{votes}

##' @export


Votes.getByOfficial <-
	function (year, candidateId) {

		# internal function
		Votes.getByOfficial.basic <- 
			function (.year, .candidateId) {

				request <-  "Votes.getByOfficial?"
				inputs  <-  paste("&year=",.year,"&candidateId=",.candidateId,sep="")
				output  <-  pvsRequest(request,inputs)
				output$year <-.year
				output$candidateId <- .candidateId
				output
			}

		#Main function
		output.list <- lapply(year, FUN= function (y) {
			lapply(candidateId, FUN= function (s) {
				Votes.getByOfficial.basic(.year=y, .candidateId=s)
			}
			)
		}
		)
		
		output.list <- redlist(output.list)
		output <- bind_rows(output.list)
		
		return(output)
	}