Introduction of new mnis_political_interests() function.
mnis_member_date() and mnis_full_biog() now accept vectors of member IDs.
Changing approach of mnis_full_biog() to fix issue where some tibbles lacked column names.
Improvements to documentation examples and layout.
mnis_tidy() and related functions are no longer exported.
Fixed test error for mnis_eligible(), as the data returned by this function is too dynamic for some of the previously used tests to be effective.
Case sensitivity has been removed from all parameters that were previously case sensitive.
Variable styles now apply to dataframe names in mnis_all_reference(), and the function has been sped up slightly.
Calls to the API using httr and jsonlite have been moved to generic or class-specific helper functions to reduce the total amount of code, make multi-function files easier to navigate and make any changes to the API easier to adjust to.
Fixed bug in mnis_tidy() that didn’t correct data schema names.
Fixed test errors for mnis_joined_between().
Removed basic_details parameter from mnis_extra(), as it didn’t provide any information that wasn’t included by other parameters.
Changed mnis_extra() code to eliminate duplicate columns.
Now accepts dates as character values in “YYYY-MM-DD” format, and objects of class Date, POSIXt, POSIXct, POSIXlt or anything else than can be coerced to a date with as.Date().
Fixed bugs on mnis_joined_between to return full, proper tibble.
Dropped parameter ‘joined_since’ from mnis_all_members, in favour of mnis_joined_between.
Tidied up code in mnis_reference functions.
Fixed bug in mnis_party_state which produced an error if not using the current system date.
Added optional ‘tidy_style’ parameter, allowing users to decide which style "snake_case", "camelCase" and "period.case" they want variable names to be in, if ‘tidy’==TRUE.
mnis_mps_on_date and mnis_peers_on_date functions introduced, which return all members of the House of Commons or the House of Lords eligible to sit on a given date.
Bug fixes for constituency names in mnis_eligible
mnis now uses tibbles instead of data frames as the data class returned from API calls.
Bug fixes for constituency names in mnis_eligible
All functions now remove byte order marks from the API response.
All empty mnis_additional functions now default to returning mnis_all_members instead of an error.
The mnis_all_members without any parameters now returns an error message that tells the user to include data for the ID parameter, rather than a generic API error.
Expansion of tidy function to all other package functions and improved speed and quality.
Fixed errors in mnis_extra that prevented it from functioning properly.
Improved handling of deprecated functions.
New mnis_all_members function that returns all members from both houses, with various options accepted as function parameters.
The old function names were awkward. The new ones are all lower case and use underscores to separate individual words. All old function names have been deprecated, but can still be called.
mnis_eligible returns a data frame with information on all members eligible or previously eligible to sit in the House of Lords, the House of Commons, or both.
The Members’ Names Information Service returns variables names with extra text, including periods, @ signs and superfluous text stuck on the end of names. The tidy parameter gives an option to remove this extra text.
mnis_JoinedBetween returns a data frame with information on all members who joined the House of Lords, the House of Commons, or both, between two given dates.
As the Members’ Names Information Service has dozens of different search parameters and hundreds of possible combinations of searches, it is not reasonable to build functions for every possible query to the API. However, I will be rolling out functions for potentially common queries as and when I can. If you have any particular queries you would like functions for please let me know and I’ll create it.
This is the first release of the mnis package, which provides functions to download data from the Members’ Names Information Service for the UK Houses of Parliament.
See the package documentation for details on each function and the type of data available.