Examples

These examples will help you get started with the Legistar Web API. To use the URLs below, replace {Client} with your client name. Some clients require use of an API Token.

To see all agenda matters, the endpoint is:

https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{Client}/matters

Note that queries replies are limited to 1000 responses. Even with this limit, some calls may return a large amount of data. To make this query more performant by limiting reults to a smaller set of items or to obtain more items via a second query, use ODATA parameters to page the output like this:

https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{Client}/matters?$top=10&$skip=0
https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{Client}/matters?$top=10&$skip=10

ODATA can also use filters to find more specific data. For instance, this query will return only events during the month of September, 2014:

https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{Client}/events?$filter=EventDate+ge+datetime%272014-09-01%27+and+EventDate+lt+datetime%272014-10-01%27

The basics of the ODATA URL setup are here: https://www.odata.org/documentation/odata-version-3-0/url-conventions/

The ODATA documentation does not cover all features, including the convenience method datetime’2014-09-01’ shown above.

To see actions taken on a Matter (like a vote), look at the Matter Histories endpoint. Filtering these items by MatterHistoryActionBodyName can help to limit the found actions to just those votes performed by a certain group, for instance just to votes made by the Common Council on a matter 1234:

https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{Client}/matters/1234/histories?$filter=MatterHistoryPassedFlag%20ne%20null%20and%20MatterHistoryActionBodyName%20eq%20%27Common%20Council%27

To then see the vote tally, use the returned Id (5678 in this example) with the EventItems Votes endpoint:

https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{Client}/eventitems/5678/votes

There are many other items and relationships in the API. If you have a specific use case, we’d be happy to help you find the appropriate calls.

Tips

• http and https are both supported for GETs – please use as appropriate for your data and consumer.
• Items returned to GET requests are limited to those items marked as public and available for view on InSite.
• Limiting queries by paging and filtering will reduce both the load on the server and the time needed to return the requested data.
• Fields in the API do not reflect any label customization done for your specific site. If you need help identifying a field’s relationship to your specific Legistar configuration, please ask.
• For an especially busy site, ordering by item IDs and paging with a filter GT (greater than) the highest returned ID in a set may be more stable. If you find you are occasionally missing items in long list queries, this is worthwhile to investigate, but slightly more complex.

Tokens

Some clients require use of API tokens for access. If the read-only operations above give an unauthorized response, please refer to that client for their token policy.

If you have a token, it can be provided as a URL parameter to the https endpoint of this API.

For example:

https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{Client}/matters?token=verylongbase64token

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