README

Pennsylvania state driver for wiserwebsolutions/laravel-lobbyist, backed by the data published by the Pennsylvania General Assembly at palegis.us — the per-chamber RSS feeds plus the Bill History Data bulk export. It registers itself with the Lobbyist manager under the pa abbreviation, so Lobbyist::state('PA') resolves to it.

Requires the PHP zip and simplexml extensions (used for the Bill History Data download).

Installation

composer require wiserwebsolutions/laravel-lobbyist-palegis

The package auto-registers. Publish its config to customize feed URLs, request, or caching settings:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=palegis-config

# optional
PALEGIS_TIMEOUT=30
PALEGIS_RETRY_TIMES=2
PALEGIS_CACHE_ENABLED=true
PALEGIS_CACHE_STORE=
PALEGIS_CACHE_TTL=3600
PALEGIS_BILL_HISTORY_TTL=3600   # cache lifetime for the (large) bill-history download

Feed and download URLs are fixed and generated automatically, and the bill history defaults to the current regular session — there is nothing to configure for either. (To read a past session, pass its id to the low-level getBillHistory('2023_0').) If a generated URL ever fails, the driver throws a PalegisException naming the attempted URL, the HTTP status, and how to report the problem.

Usage

use WiserWebSolutions\Lobbyist\Facades\Lobbyist;

$pa = Lobbyist::state('PA'); // PalegisDriver

$pa->bills();            // BillCollection (all bills/resolutions from Bill History Data)
$pa->bill('HB17');       // Bill (lookup by number or full id)
$pa->votes();            // VoteCollection (House + Senate roll-call feeds)
$pa->representatives();  // LegislatorCollection (House + Senate members feeds)
$pa->sessions();         // SessionCollection (current General Assembly)

Capabilities & limitations

Bills come from the Bill History Data export — a bulk download of every bill and resolution in the session (with sponsors, printer numbers, and full action history preserved on ->meta['raw']). This backs both bills() and lookups via bill($numberOrId). Note it is a large download (thousands of bills, tens of MB uncompressed) fetched and cached as a unit, so the first call in a cache window is expensive; bill() filters that same cached dataset.

Votes and members come from the RSS feeds, which are browse-only — they publish what is current but cannot resolve an arbitrary id. So the driver implements VoteProvider/RepresentativeProvider but not their *Lookup interfaces; calling vote() or representative() throws UnsupportedOperationException. Fields the feeds do not carry (e.g. vote tallies) are left null.

Low-level access

The underlying LaravelPalegis client is bound as a singleton and exposes every palegis.us feed directly as parsed arrays.

Bill History Data: getBillHistory(?string $session = null) returns ['export_date', 'total', 'session', 'bills' => [...]], each bill with its sponsors, printers_numbers, and actions.

RSS feeds — House: getHouseCalendar(), getHouseTabledBillCalendar(), getHouseJournals(), getHouseReports(), getHouseVotes(), getHouseAmendments(), getHouseMembers(), getHouseCommitteeSchedule(), getHouseCommitteeAssignments(), getHouseCosponsorshipMemos(). Senate feeds: getSenateCalendar(), getSenateJournals(), getSenateNotes(), getSenateVotes(), getSenateAmendments(), getSenateMembers(), getSenateExecutiveNominations(), getSenateCommitteeSchedule(), getSenateCommitteeAssignments(), getSenateCosponsorshipMemos().

Testing

Tests use Http::fake() with RSS fixtures and never hit the network:

composer install
vendor/bin/phpunit

License

MIT © Daniel Wiser