karlnicholas / congress-legislators

This program parses the congressional legislators yaml file into java beans.

This program parses the congressional legislators yaml file into java beans. The original files are found at https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators

The java beans can then be easily worked with to extract desired information

This main class, GovTrackRecords, reads the legislators files and then streams them so they can be manipulated using Java-8 lambda expressions.

The program assumes that the congress-legislators files will be in the src/main/resources directory. You will need to get a copy of them from the above link. See getting started below.

I wrote it so as to extract congressional party information between the years 1960 and 2017 and create a CSV file with the number of democrat and republican legislators for each region of the US. It made a nice graph. See reps.txt and reps.xlsx.

		****** Getting Started ********

1: Clone this repository. You can import it into Eclipse, with File->Import->Check out Maven Project from SCM.

3: The project needs at least JDK version 8.

4: You will need to get the legislators-historical.yaml and the legislators-current.yaml files and put them into the src/main/resources directory.

5: Instantiate GovTrackRecords and then call the .stream() method.

6: There are two example program files in the default package, which is in the src/main/java directory.

a. GovTrackFilterExample: This program reads the data
and does an simple filter by lastname and prints out the count. 
It shows a simple and not too complicated example of working with 
the Java Beans. See the comments in the file for more information.

b. ExportPartiesByRegion: This is the program that 
created reps.txt which was used to create the reps.xlsx

7: Packages are: a. model: has the java beans for each of the different GovTrack data nodes.