Quick Start

There are two ways to instantiate the communication object.

Regular

• Create a new HTTP client. For a list of available HTTP clients, visit the Http Adapters page.

$adapter = new FurryBear\Http\Adapter\Curl();

• Create a new API provider instance and pass the adapter instance to it. For a list of available providers, visit the Providers page.

$provider = new FurryBear\Provider\Source\SunlightCongress($adapter, $apiKey);

• Create an instance for the output strategy. Sunlight Congress API results are in json format. FurryBear provides two strategies to work with json. One returns a result as an array and the other as an object. For more information on output strategies, visit the Output Strategies page.

$output = new FurryBear\Output\Strategy\JsonToArray();

• Create the entry point class instance and register the provider and the output strategy with it.

$fb = new FurryBear\FurryBear();
$fb->registerProvider($provider)
   ->registerOutput($output);

• Now we are ready to access some of the resources. The various Sunlight Foundation Congress API methods can be accessed via properties of the FurryBear\FurryBear object. For a list of all available resources, visit the Providers page.

The following example demonstrates a request with full text search (query), partial response (fields), pagination (per_page, page), and highlighting (highlight). The parameters are passed using the setParams() method.

$params  = array('query'           => '"health care" medicine',
                 'history.enacted' => true,
                 'fields'          => 'official_title,chamber,introduced_on,search',
                 'highlight'       => true,
                 'per_page'        => 25,
                 'page'            => 2);

try {
    $fb->bills_search->setParams($params);
    var_dump($fb->bills_search->get());
} catch (\Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
}

Here is another example this time using a chainable interface and more detailed exceptions. For a list of available chainable methods for each provider, visit the Providers page.

try {
    var_dump(
            $fb->bills_search->fields('official_title', 'chamber', 'introduced_on', 'search')
                             ->search('"health care" medicine')
                             ->filter('history.enacted', true)
                             ->order('introduced_on')
                             ->order('bill_id', 'asc')
                             ->highlight('<strong>', '</strong>', 300)
                             ->page(2, 25)
                             ->explain()
                             ->get()
    );
} catch (FurryBear\Exception\NoProviderException $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
} catch (FurryBear\Exception\NoOutputException $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
} catch (FurryBear\Exception\NoResultException $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
} catch (FurryBear\Exception\FileDoesNotExistException $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
}

Dependency Injection Container

The second way to create the communication object via the FurryBearContainer. The latter has set as default a cURL connection to the Sunlight Congress API that outputs the result as an array. Thus, using this way minimizes the initial code. For example:

use FurryBear\FurryBearContainer;

$container = new FurryBearContainer();
$container['apikey'] = 'Your Sunlight Foundation API Key';
$searchCriteria = array('query' => '"health care" medicine');

var_dump($container['furrybear']->bills_search->get($searchCriteria));

To change any of the services, just redefine them using anonymous functions. Let's continue from the previous example:

use FurryBear\Provider\Source\SunlightOpenStates;

$container['provider'] = function() use ($container) {
    return new SunlightOpenStates($container['adapter'], $container['apikey']);
};

var_dump($container['furrybear']->legislator_detail->id('DCL000012')->get());

For a sample implementation, see the FurryBearContainer class. To get a list of all registered services with the container:

print_r($container->getServices());

The same rules apply to use the resources for each provider as in the previous section.