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nycapitolcamp / legislative-apps

Apps providing new visualizations to Open Legislation data.
http://nycapitolcamp.github.com/legislative-apps/
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Allow diffing more than just base bill + amendment A #11

Closed GraylinKim closed 11 years ago

GraylinKim commented 11 years ago

This is especially not useful for bills that have 3+ amendments.

rcbarnes commented 11 years ago

GraylinKim, we appreciate the feedback, and we are well aware that as-is the tool is little more than a proof-of-concept. The API for our data source is broken/buggy for fields that we need for more robust version selection, so these fixes (and others) await external change before becoming feasible.

GraylinKim commented 11 years ago

Sure, I am just filing the ticket for later.

The current API could be used to do this though. Waiting for improvements isn't strictly necessary.

rcbarnes commented 11 years ago

Granted, we know enough to work around the current API bug, I think we just prefer to wait until the fix comes (since we know who maintains the back-end that produces the bug and he's likely to push out the fix in a matter of days), rather than build out code on a kludge that presumes some details about the legislative data that we haven't strictly verified as correct.

Personally, I'm focusing on a couple changes that will be very likely needed once we have more robust API data but which are independent of the exact mechanism by which it's gathered ("good" API or work-around).

However, I shouldn't act like I speak for everyone, so any place where I allude to the larger group read that as "Clay vaguely recalls an unofficial, approximate consensus along these lines..." :-P

GraylinKim commented 11 years ago

We already pull down all the related amendments and their bill information. It'd be nice to extend the header options to allow a user to choose (with good defaults) which things are diffed in the area below.

Traditional diff tools just handle this by requiring two input file arguments. We could do something similar with two select boxes, each populated with [Law, Bill, Amendment, ..., Amendment] according to the bill specified by the user.

abutterworth commented 11 years ago

I may have partially addressed this in the Amendment Dropdowns branch.

GraylinKim commented 11 years ago

This branch has been merged.