ocdsmerge 0.5

Important caveats

• You must ensure that the OCDS releases that you provide as input have the same OCID.

• If you are using an older version of the OCDS release schema, you must specify the older schema as a URL, file path, or Python dictionary (see below).

• If you are using OCDS extensions, you should patch the OCDS release schema (for instance, using json-merge-patch) and specify the patched schema as a URL, file path, or Python dictionary.

Using different release schema

By default, the merge and merge_versioned functions use the latest version of the OCDS release schema, which they download once. However, you may want to use an older version, an extended schema, or a local schema to avoid remote requests. To do so, use the optional schema argument, which can be:

• A URL to a release schema, as a string starting with http

• A file path to a release schema, as a string

• a release schema, as a Python dictionary

# URL
ocdsmerge.merge(releases, schema='http://standard.open-contracting.org/schema/1__0__3/release-schema.json')

# Relative file path
ocdsmerge.merge(releases, schema='release-schema.json')

# Absolute file path
ocdsmerge.merge(releases, schema='/absolute/path/to/release-schema.json')

# A Python dictionary, stored in a `release_schema` variable
ocdsmerge.merge(releases, schema=release_schema)

Using cached merge rules

The merge and merge_versioned functions extract merge rules from the release schema. If the release schema were provided as a string (i.e. as a URL or file path), then these merge rules are automatically cached between function calls. However, if it were provided as a Python dictionary, then they won’t be cached. To manually cache merge rules, use the get_merge_rules function:

merge_rules = ocdsmerge.get_merge_rules('release-schema.json')

ocdsmerge.merge(releases, merge_rules=merge_rules)

Test cases

We provide test cases for other implementations of OCDS merging under the tests/fixtures directory. The 1.0 and 1.1 directories contain files like simple.json, which contain a list of OCDS releases as JSON; the suffixed simple-compiled.json and simple-versioned.json files contain the expected compiled release and versioned release respectively. To test your implementation, provide as input a file like simple.json as well as the appropriate version of the OCDS release schema, and compare your output to files like simple-compiled.json and simple-versioned.json.

To prepare your implementation for future versions and third-party extensions, you can test your implementation using the files under the schema directory and using the schema in the schema.json file.

In future, we can consider providing a more formal test suite, like those for CSV on the Web.

Copyright (c) 2015 Open Contracting Partnership, released under the BSD license