Calling an OData Service From Python – UK Parliament Members Data Platform

Whilst having a quick play producing Slack bots and slash commands around the UK Parliament APIs, I noticed (again) that the Members data platform has an OData endpoint.

OData is a data protocol for querying online data services via HTTP requests although it never really seemed to have caught the popular imagination, possibly because Microsoft thought it up, possibly because it seems really fiddly to use…

I had a quick look around for Python client/handler for it, and the closest I came was the pyslet package. I’ve posted a notebook showing my investigations to date here: Handling the UK Parliament Members Data Platform OData Feed, but it seems really clunky and I’m not sure I’ve got it right! (There doesn’t seem to be a lot of tutorial support out there, either?)

Here’s an example of the sort of mess I got myself in:

To make the Parliament OData service more useful needs a higher level Python wrapper, I think, that abstracts a bit further and provides some function calls that make it a tad easier (and natural) to get at the data. Or maybe I need to step back, have a read of the OData blocks, properly get my head around the pyslet OData calls, and try again!