civics_cdf_validator is a script that checks if a NIST 1500-100 data feed follows best practices. It will output errors, warnings, and info messages for common issues.

This is not an official Google product.

INSTALLATION

The package is available from PyPi and can be installed using the command below.

pip install civics_cdf_validator

civics_cdf_validator relies on lxml which will be installed if it isn’t already installed. You may need to install libxslt development libraries in order to build lxml.

USAGE

Branch Definitions

• master - Branch used in production.
• staging - Branch that contains next version of production code, typically available one month in advance of a production push.
• dev - Branch that contains development code with latest changes changes to the validator. This branch is rolled into staging on a monthly basis.

Supported feeds

You can use civics_cdf_validator to check different types of feed:

• Officeholder
• Candidate
• Results
• Committee
• Election Dates
• Metadata
• Voter information

List rules

You can list the default validation rules attached with a brief description of each by using the “list” command:

civics_cdf_validator list

You can also customize the displayed list by specifying your set of rules or at least you can filter the default list using parameters as the feed type / ignore rules flag.

For more details, you can use the command help :

civics_cdf_validator list --help

Validate a file

The validate command has 2 required arguments:

• the election file to be validated
• the XSD file to validate against

The command to validate the election file against all the rules in the file is

civics_cdf_validator validate election_file.xml --xsd civics_cdf_spec.xsd

The validator is capable of validating either election or officeholder data feeds, depending on the value of the --rule_set flag (election is the default). Examples:

• Validate an officeholder feed:

civics_cdf_validator validate officeholder_file.xml --xsd civics_cdf_spec.xsd --rule_set officeholder

• Validate a results feed:

civics_cdf_validator validate results_file.xml --xsd civics_cdf_spec.xsd --rule_set election_results

• Validate a metadata feed:

civics_cdf_validator validate metadata_file.xml --xsd metadata_spec.xsd --rule_set metadata

One can choose to only validate one or more comma separated rules by using the -i flag

civics_cdf_validator validate election_file.xml --xsd civics_cdf_spec.xsd -i Schema

Or choose to exclude one or more comma separated rules using the -e flag

civics_cdf_validator validate election_file.xml --xsd civics_cdf_spec.xsd -e Schema

By default, the script only shows a summary of issues found. You can get a verbose report by adding the -v flag

civics_cdf_validator validate election_file.xml --xsd civics_cdf_spec.xsd -v