R/legiVotesJSON.R

In wbuchanan/legiscanR: R interface to the LegiScan API

##' @title Legiscan Voting Data
##' @description Parses and arranges JSON data from
##' Legiscan master data dumps vote subdirectory
##' @param file A JSON file object from the vote subdirectory
##' @return Creates a list object containing a data frame
##' for voting metadata and individual legislators' votes
#' @examples \donttest{
#' # Create directory object
#' directoryTree <- fileStructure("data/msHistoricalJSON/")
#'
#' # Create file list object
#' files <- fileLists(directoryTree)
#'
#' # Parse/clean the voting records data from a LegiScan votes file
#' votes <- legiscanVotes(files[["votes"]])
#' }
#'
#' @importFrom RJSONIO fromJSON
#' @importFrom lubridate ymd
#' @importFrom dplyr bind_cols
#' @export legiVotesJSON
#' @family Parsing and Cleaning LegiScan Data
#' @name legiVotesJSON
legiVotesJSON <- function(file) {

  # Parse the JSON data
  meta <- as.data.frame(RJSONIO::fromJSON(file)[["roll_call"]][-10], stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

  # Replace date with date formatted value
  meta$date <- lubridate::ymd(meta$date)

  # Make sure numeric values for overall counts are stored as numeric data
  meta[, c(5:9)] <- as.numeric(meta[, c(5:9)])

  # Extract the individual voting records of legislators in separate data frame
  votes <- as.data.frame(fromJSON(file)[["roll_call"]][10],
                         stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

  # Add the roll call, bill IDs, and date to the votes table
  votes <- dplyr::bind_cols(meta[, c(1:3)], votes)

  # Store both data frames in a single list object
  votesOnBill <- list(meta = meta, records = votes)

  # Return the list obejct
  return(votesOnBill)

} # End of Function