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LibraryOfCongress
Bill `updateDate` filter is difficult to navigate
Hi there,
It's difficult to query bills when looking at a specific time frame.
As an example:
https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill?api_key={{API_KEY}}&limit=250
&fromDateTime=2019-11-14T00:00:00Z
&toDateTime=2019-11-14T23:00:00Z
This query spans 1 day in November of 2019 and returns 0 results.
https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill?api_key={{API_KEY}}&limit=250
&fromDateTime=2019-11-14T00:00:00Z
&toDateTime=2019-11-15T23:00:00Z
This query looks at just one more day later in November of 2019 and returns 10105 results, and most of these results are unexpectedly bills that are much older than 2019.
My guess is that this is related to the fact that the LOC reprocesses the bills when they are reissued by the GPO. So, is the updateDate telling us the last time the data for the bill actually changed, or is it just when it was last reprocessed?
If the latter is true, would it be possible to expose a changeDate with associated filter options that tells us when the data for the bill was last modified? I imagine that this would help spread out the results and be closer to the latestAction date.
That's a good suggestion and we're exploring the feasibility. As always, thank you for your input.
I noticed that #201, a very similar issue, was recently addressed. Do the changes applied there also resolve the above feedback in this issue?
Hi @Gmanicus - yes, you are correct that the constantly updating updateDate was addressed and we closed issue #201. There will be instances where there are a lot of bills with the same updateDate still because of processing and updates (see issue #131). However, developers did complete work on ensuring that the updateDate filter was refined a bit so we expect that you should not see this issue recurring as frequently anymore.
However, we did leave this issue open since you had other requests related to adding new elements and a new filter, which were outside of the scope of the other Git issue. If you feel comfortable closing this issue, please do so, but I didn't want to should we decide to explore more filter options, etc. I hope this helps!
