opensecrets

OpenSecrets API Go Client

This is a Go client for the OpenSecrets campaign finance API. It handles HTTP calls and response marshalling, so you can simply call a method and get a struct representing the OpenSecrets response back.

Installation

go get github.com/KiaFarhang/opensecrets

Usage

Constructing a client

First, instantiate an OpenSecretsClient by passing your API key to the constructor function:

package whatever

import (
	"github.com/KiaFarhang/opensecrets/pkg/client"
	"github.com/KiaFarhang/opensecrets/pkg/models"
)

openSecretsClient := client.NewOpenSecretsClient("YOUR_API_KEY")

If you'd like to customize the HTTP client the library uses, call the NewOpenSecretsClientWithHttpClient constructor instead:

httpClient := &http.Client{Timeout: time.Second * 3} // Whatever other configuration you want here...

openSecretsClient := client.NewOpenSecretsClientWithHttpClient("YOUR_API_KEY", httpClient)

The custom HTTP client can be anything that satisfies the following interface:

type OpenSecretsHttpClient interface {
	Do(req *http.Request) (*http.Response, error)
}

The default client has a 5-second HTTP timeout.

The OpenSecretsClient is thread safe; you should construct one and share it throughout your application.

Making API calls

The client has public methods for each of the OpenSecrets API methods. To call one, just pass it the appropriate request object from the models package:

request := models.LegislatorsRequest{Id: "TX"}
legislators, err := client.GetLegislators(request)

The client will either return a struct containing the data from the API call or an error if something went wrong.

The client throws an error if you pass it a request that's missing a required parameter. Required parameters are the same as those noted in the docs for each method, listed in the table below. (Each request struct also includes comments noting the required and optional fields)

Note you never need to pass the apikey or output arguments to the client. It sends the API key passed at construction with every request, and it always requests output in JSON so it can marshal that response into the struct each method returns.

For a full example of each API call, see the end-to-end tests at pkg/client/client_end_to_end_test.go. You can run them locally by pulling down this repo and using the following command from its root directory:

API_KEY=your_key_here go test ./...

Available methods

Development

Run unit tests with go test -short ./...

Run unit and end-to-end tests with API_KEY=your_key_here go test ./...