Laravel Lobbyist

Search, monitor, and summarize legislative activity — bills, votes, and elected representatives — across the United States, through a single driver-agnostic API.

This is the core package. It ships the contract, the driver manager, and the normalized data objects, but no data source of its own. You install one or more driver packages that plug in behind it:

Installation

composer require wiserwebsolutions/laravel-lobbyist
# plus at least one driver — the default nationwide driver:
composer require wiserwebsolutions/laravel-lobbyist-legiscan

Publish the config if you want to change the default driver:

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

Usage

Lobbyist::state($abbr) resolves the driver registered for that state, falling back to the default driver (legiscan) when no state-specific driver is installed. The returned object is scoped to that state.

use WiserWebSolutions\Lobbyist\Facades\Lobbyist;

// Uses the LegiScan default driver (nationwide coverage).
$ca = Lobbyist::state('CA');
$bills = $ca->bills();            // BillCollection
$bill = $ca->bill('AB1');         // Bill (lookup by number)

// Uses the PA driver if laravel-palegis is installed, else the LegiScan default.
$pa = Lobbyist::state('PA');
$votes = $pa->votes();            // VoteCollection
$people = $pa->representatives();  // LegislatorCollection

Which operations a driver supports varies by source — check first (see below).

Capabilities

Not every data source supports every operation — an RSS feed can list current bills but cannot look up an arbitrary bill by id. Drivers therefore implement only the capabilities they can back, and you can check before calling:

use WiserWebSolutions\Lobbyist\Contracts\Capability;
use WiserWebSolutions\Lobbyist\Contracts\Providers\BillLookup;

$driver = Lobbyist::state('CA'); // LegiScan

if ($driver->supports(Capability::GetBill)) {
    $bill = $driver->bill(1132030); // Bill
}

// or type-check the segregated interface directly:
if ($driver instanceof BillLookup) {
    $bill = $driver->bill('AB1');
}

Calling an unsupported lookup throws UnsupportedOperationException.

Data objects

Drivers return normalized spatie/laravel-data objects — Session, Bill, Vote, Legislator — regardless of source. States are typed via the StateEnum, chambers via Chamber, parties via Party.

These objects are provider-agnostic: each derives its typed properties from a documented, normalized meta array (see the class docblocks for the recognized keys) and is unaware of any specific data source. It is a driver's job to map its raw payload into that shape — so adding a new provider never requires touching core. Drivers typically keep the raw payload under meta['raw'] so nothing is lost.

Writing a state driver

1. Create a package that requires wiserwebsolutions/laravel-lobbyist.

2. Write a driver extending WiserWebSolutions\Lobbyist\Support\AbstractDriver and implementing the provider/lookup interfaces you can actually back. AbstractDriver derives capabilities()/supports() from those interfaces automatically and throws UnsupportedOperationException for lookups you omit.

3. Map your source's raw payloads into the core DTOs' normalized meta shape — keep this in a mapper class in your package (see LegiscanMapper / PalegisMapper for reference). Core never learns about your source.

4. Register it from your service provider's boot(), order-independently:

   $this->app->resolving('lobbyist', function ($manager) {
       $manager->extend('pa', fn () => new PaDriver(/* ... */));
   });
   

5. Verify compliance with the shipped WiserWebSolutions\Lobbyist\Testing\AssertsDriverContract trait.

Testing

composer install
vendor/bin/phpunit

License

MIT © Daniel Wiser