The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is the independent regulatory agency charged with administering and enforcing the federal campaign finance law. The FEC has jurisdiction over the financing of campaigns for the U.S. House, Senate, Presidency and the Vice Presidency.

This project will provide a web application for filling out FEC campaign finance information. The project code is distributed across these repositories:

• fecfile-web-app: this is the browser-based front-end developed in Angular
• fecfile-web-api: RESTful endpoint supporting the front-end
• fecfile-api-proxy: Reverse proxy for API for IP blocking and rate limiting
• fecfile-validate: data validation rules and engine

The FEC validator is designed around the disemination of FEC defined data specifications using the JSON Schema Specification.

The initial baseline spec for the definition of each form item is found in the FEC Format MS Excel spreadsheet found in the FEC Vendor Pack. (https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/filing-reports/fecfile-software/) See bin/generate-starter-schema.py for the script that created the initial schema definition files that were then manually curated and updated.

The data dictionary can be found in a human-freindly HTML format at: https://fecgov.github.io/fecfile-validate/

JSON schema properties with a "fec_" prefix are not part of the JSON Schema Standard but are custom validation enhancements performed by the FEC validation engine in addition to the validation performed by the JSON Schema Standard validation tools.

• fec_recommended: Array of properties that if the property listed in the array is missing a value, the validation passes but with a warning issued about the missing value

Deployment instructions...

This section covers a few topics we think might help developers after setup.

After modified the JSON schema files, those changes must be registered in the fecfile-web-app and fecfile-web-api repositories using the hash of the commit of the edits.

In the fecfile-web-app repo:

1. Update the commit hash in the package.json file for the fecfile-validate dependency
2. Remove the package-lock.json file
3. Rebuild the package-lock.json file to commit it to the repo with the "npm install" command

In the fecfile-web-api repo:

1. Update the commit hash for the fecfile-validate dependency in the requirements.txt file.

The online documentation for the validation JSON files is hosted on GitHub pages at https://fecgov.github.io/fecfile-validate/ To update this documentation when changes are made to the JSON validation files, we use the json-schema-for-humans python package. To generate the documentation, follow these steps:

1. pip install -r requirements.txt
2. cd schema
3. ../bin/generate_schema_docs.sh