Source: examples/03-congress-locale
Live-demo on Heroku (for now)
There's not much to this besides more data-munging. Whereas the previous example had a search box that allowed users to search by last name, this variation allows entry of ZIP code, which is even easier since you don't have to worry about matching upper/lowercase. To make this a little tricker, I've designed the form to also accept state abbreviation, if a user can't remember their zip code.
The only tricky part is that the data-wrangling code has to traverse two datasets: the legislators listing and a lookup table that matches zip codes to congressional districts.
The structure of the table is so simple that there aren't even any table headers (which means I have to supply them manually when I parse the CSV):
|-------|----|---| | 55784 | MN | 8 | | 56688 | MN | 8 | | 55786 | MN | 8 | | 54479 | WI | 7 | | 56680 | MN | 8 | | 54654 | WI | 3 |
When a user supplies a zip code, the first step is to read the [districts.csv]((examples/03-congress-names/static/data/districts.csv) data (which I've stuffed into the variable ziplookups) and get the rows in which the zipcode column matches the user's input.
Then, we match against legislators.csv, the relevant part of which looks like this:
| party | state | district |
|---|---|---|
| D | HI | 1 |
| D | NY | 5 |
| R | AL | 4 |
| D | HI | Junior Seat |
| R | CO | Senior Seat |
| D | NJ | 1 |
| D | ME | 1 |
| R | MO | 2 |
House members have a state and district. To get a user's Senators, we simply match on state.
I think the most notable part of this example is how I've removed the data-wrangling code out of app.py and split it into foo.py and helpers.py.
Why two files? It could've just been foo.py...but I wanted app.py to only worry about calling one function -- foo.just_do_it(). All the functions for reading and filtering the datasets are hidden away in helpers.py. My approach isn't more right than a less fractured one...I sometimes just like shuffling things up for variety's sake.
The upshot is that I can also run foo.just_do_it() on its own in iPython:
from foo import just_do_it
peeps = just_do_it(zipcode='90210')
print(len(peeps))
# 9