LibraryOfCongress
Access to OpenAPI specification?
I was looking through the endpoints and noticed that the endpoints are defined using OpenAPI (previously called Swagger). This specification allows people to autogenerate client code into a whole bunch of programming languages using the openapi-generator from OpenAPITools. Having client code in all sorts of languages will allow developers to more easily access your API.
A list of supported languages can be found here: https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator#overview
Can there be a stable URL for downloading the Swagger/OpenAPI specification?
Examples: https://api.congress.gov/specification/2022-09-08/openapi.yaml
As a workaround, it looks like the specification is stored in var spec in the script tag towards the bottom of view-source:https://api.congress.gov.
It would be nice if it used the standard https://api.congress.gov/openapi.json
Also, see What is the Difference Between Swagger and OpenAPI?
Heres a bookmarklet to export the in-memory spec to a json file. Tested in firefox:
javascript: (() => { const filename = 'swagger.json'; const jsonStr = JSON.stringify(ui.getConfigs().spec); let element = document.createElement('a'); element.setAttribute('href', 'data:text/plain;charset=utf-8,' + encodeURIComponent(jsonStr)); element.setAttribute('download', filename); element.style.display = 'none'; document.body.appendChild(element); element.click(); document.body.removeChild(element); })();
Not sure how often they update their specification but I pulled it from the markup and loaded it into a ReadMe project[^1], which you can check out here: https://congress.readme.io
As part of this, I cleaned up the spec and converted it to OpenAPI 3.0: https://congress.readme.io/openapi/6320bd793750a5001222766f
Still could use some love (i.e. using properly defined response examples, as opposed to stringified code snippets in the description fields 😬), but it's a start!
[^1]: Disclaimer: I'm a ReadMe employee so I'm a bit biased, but this is my personal favorite way to interact with an API! 🦉
Right now, we're mostly concerned with refining the current offerings. But we are considering possible enhancements for future development, and we'll add this to the list.
