CongressForms

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'congress_forms'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install congress_forms

Program Dependencies

• google-chrome, git

Usage

To send a message to Congress, begin by creating a form object. Senators should be identified by their BioGuide ID, while Representatives are identified by an office code HXXYY, where XX is their state and YY is their district.

# Form for Senator Kamala Harris (BioGuide H001075)
CongressForms::Form.find("H001075")

# Form for CA-13 Represenative Barbara Lee (office code HCA13)
CongressForms::Form.find("HCA13")

Each Senator's office may require different fields, provide different options for select menus, etc. You can query the fields required by a particular form by calling CongressForms::Form#required_params.

# List required message parameters
irb(main)> CongressForms::Form.find("H001075").required_params
[
  # Required text fields
  { :value => "$NAME_FIRST", :max_length => nil },
  { :value => "$NAME_LAST", :max_length => nil },

  # Required multiple choice field
  { :value => "$NAME_PREFIX", :options => ["Mr.", "Ms.", "Mrs.", ...] },

  # Required multiple choice field with distinct labels and values
  {
    :value => "$TOPIC", :options => {
      "Abortion" => "943AD4D7-5056-A066-60A5-D652A671D70E",
      "Agriculture" => "943AD58A-5056-A066-60BD-A9DBEE1187A1",
      "Animal Welfare" => "943AD622-5056-A066-6065-1B45E2F6F45D",
    }
  },
 ...
]
...

Pass the required values, in a hash, to CongressForms::Form#fill to send the message.

form = CongressForms::Form.find("H001075")

form.fill(
  "$NAME_FIRST" => "...",
  "$NAME_LAST" => "...",
  "$MESSAGE" => "...",
  ...
)

For Senate offices, this will fill out the representative's contact form with a headless instance of Google Chrome. For House offices, messages are submitted through the Communicating with Congress (CWC) API.

CLI Usage

You can also send messages from the command line:

$ bin/congress_forms --help
Usage: congress_forms [options]
    -i, --rep_id REP_ID              ID of the representative to message
    -r, --repo DIR                   Location for unitedstates/contact_congress repository
    -p, --param KEY=VALUE            e.g. -p NAME_FIRST=Badger

Operation and Configuration

Senate messages rely on contact form details tracked by the unitedstates/contact-congress project. This repo is cloned into a temporary directory by default. You can configure CongressForms to use an existing/persistent direcory with

CongressForms.contact_congress_repository = "data/contact_congress"

A git pull is performed every now and then in this direcory, to keep the form details up to date. You can disable this behavior with

CongressForms.auto_update_contact_congress = false

House messages are submitted through the Communicating with Congress API. To send messages to the House, you will need to complete the vendor application process, then configure the API client with

Cwc::Client.configure(
  api_key: ENV["CWC_API_KEY"],
  host: ENV["CWC_HOST"],
  delivery_agent: ENV["CWC_DELIVERY_AGENT"],
  delivery_agent_ack_email: ENV["CWC_DELIVERY_AGENT_ACK_EMAIL"],
  delivery_agent_contact_name: ENV["CWC_DELIVERY_AGENT_CONTACT_NAME"],
  delivery_agent_contact_email: ENV["CWC_DELIVERY_AGENT_CONTACT_EMAIL"],
  delivery_agent_contact_phone: ENV["CWC_DELIVERY_AGENT_CONTACT_PHONE"]
)

CWC Concerns

The CWC API requires that you connect from a whitelisted IP address. This is true even for the test endpoint, which makes development and testing of the API client tricky.

If you have a whitelisted IP, you can use SSH port forwarding to tunnel requests to CWC through the approved server. Keep this command running in a console:

$ ssh -L [port]:test-cwc.house.gov:443 [server]

Use https://localhost:[port]/ as your CWC host, and define these environment variables:

CWC_VERIFY_SSL=false
CWC_HOST_HEADER=test-cwc.house.gov

(substitute [server] and [port] with your own values)

Disabling headless mode

Chrome can be run in windowed mode by setting the environment variable HEADLESS=0.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/efforg/congress_forms.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the GPLv3 License.