updateDate unaffected by new terms

[Gmanicus]

Hello,

There appears to be a major discrepancy between the web app and the API for the 119th Congress.

The /member endpoint with fromDateTime set to December 1st only returns 176 members, but it looks like all of the members are returned when searching for members of the 119th Congress on Congress.gov.

Will these take time to percolate to the API?

[Gmanicus]

I had a hunch and tried the search by Congress endpoint: /member/congress/119. This appears to return the expected 539 (535 + 4 delegates, perhaps?) members.

It looks like most of the members of the 119th Congress just didn't receive an updated updateDate when updated with the new term.

[apreiter18]

Hi @Gmanicus - thanks for reaching out. Yes, filtering by Congress is the best option to gather the entirety of the 119th Congress. At this time, we have 9 new senators (one to be sworn in TBD), 63 new representatives, and 2 new delegates. I would expect all 73 (and 74 after Senator Jim Justice of WV is sworn in) to be returned in your fromDateTime call, along with members who have new portraits and member data. I hope this helps!

[Gmanicus]

Thanks, understood.

Would it be possible to update the behavior here to include a new term as an update for the member? Reason being, the application I'm working on pulls members from the API by fromDateTime periodically in order to keep members up-to-date and add new members without fetching details for more members than needed or needing to compare against its own records for changes.

Here's an example:

{
    "member": {
        ...
        "bioguideId": "S001183",
        "directOrderName": "David Schweikert",
        "terms": [
           ...
            {
                "chamber": "House of Representatives",
                "congress": 119,
                "district": 1,
                "memberType": "Representative",
                "startYear": 2025,
                "stateCode": "AZ",
                "stateName": "Arizona"
            }
        ],
        "updateDate": "2024-06-08T18:40:15Z"
    }
}

Since Rep. Schweikert's member record hasn't been updated since June, it hasn't picked up his new term.

[apreiter18]

@Gmanicus - I will discuss this with our developers this week and will report back any updates. Thanks!

[Gmanicus]

Hey Andrew, any updates on this?

[apreiter18]

@Gmanicus - apologies for the delay. At this time, we cannot update the behavior here. I want to leave this open and mark it as "blocked by upstream development" because this might be something we can return to and investigate at a later date. I hope this helps!

[Gmanicus]

@apreiter18 No worries. Sounds good, thank you!