Sunlight Labs Extension

Examples

The following Dekiscript:

{{ sunlight.legislator{lastname: "boxer"} }}

returns a map, consisting of data regarding the legislator (such as phone number, address, party, etc.):

{ result : "Profile does not exist" }

 

Since that data set isn't particularly readable to the average end user, there is an extension that formats that data into a table. For example,

{{ sunlight.legislatorTable{lastname: "boxer"} }}

returns

Profile for "boxer" does not exist. Please check the spelling of the politician entered.

 

That's certainly more readable!

Let's say, for example, I wanted more information about legislators that are relevant to me and my neighbors. Using the following Dekiscript, I can get the data for legislators that are responsible for representing my zip code (formatted as a table):

{{ sunlight.zipTable{zip: "92101"} }}

That returns:

 

The following legislators are representatives for the zip code 92101:

 

That information is good to know!

The real power, however, comes from the extensibility of MindTouch Deki and Dekiscript. The data retrieved from the extension, while informative on its own, can be mashed up with other extensions and APIs!

For example, we can extract the Twitter ID obtained in the first dataset using:

{{ 
    var twitterID = (sunlight.legislator{lastname: "boxer"}.twitter_id) 
}}

This returns:

 

We can then take that twitter ID (shown again in the top line), and get the last 5 tweets via the Twitter API. Note that I'm also formatting the tweets in an unordered list, using the foreach statement:

{{
    var twitterID = (sunlight.legislator{lastname: "boxer"}.twitter_id); 
    var tweets = web.json('http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from:'..twitterID..'&rpp=5').results; 
    foreach (var tweet in tweets)
        {
            web.html('<ul><p>'..tweet.text..'</p></ul>')
        }
}}

The end result is: