Ability to perform a text search for members by name

[104PL104]

REQUEST - Ability to perform a text search for members by name.

I.e., search ‘leahy’ returned list of members including patrick leahy Ability to search/filter based on any combination of:

• Congress - i.e., members in the 117th congress
• Chamber - i.e., members in the senate
• State - i.e., members and representatives from Alaska
• Party - i.e., all republican members who served in the house in the 115th congress
• Committee Seniority - Per term per committee - member’s seniority rank
• Senate-wide Seniority - Per term - Committee membership information - i.e., list of committees that member belonged to during each term served

(October 2021)

LOC ASSESSMENT - The text search change is a big one because the API is architected as a hierarchical browse; not a search API. The API is implemented as a RESTful read API.

ALTERNATE APPROACH - Search could happen in local API callers databases.

[moonshiner]

Names can be problematic to get the spelling right. How about start with enum lists

• state
• party

Those should be cleaner to search for