publications endpoint only contains one publication

[seth-price-dfe]

What browser are you using?

Other

What operating system are you using?

Windows

Describe the bug

https://api.education.gov.uk/statistics/v1/publications is given as the endpoint url in the quick start guide, but only contains the Pupil attendance in schools publication.

Expected behaviour

The quick start guide implies it should contain all the data in EES. I expect the API call GET https://api.education.gov.uk/statistics/v1/publications to return a JSON containing all the publications in EES.

To reproduce

In R:

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)

url <- "https://api.education.gov.uk/statistics/v1/publications"

response <- GET(url)

data <- fromJSON(content(response, "text"), flatten = TRUE)

data is a list of only one dataset.

[cjrace]

Hi @seth-price-dfe!

It's expected that we only have one publication with API data sets right now. The Pupil attendance statistics team are our first early adopters of this as we first launch. We need to wait for the rest of the publication teams to prepare their data in a way that can be added to the API.

Over the coming months expect to see other data sets appear when ready / published. The publications available at that endpoint will reflect the publications that have data sets available on our website data catalogue - https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-catalogue?dataSetType=api&sortBy=newest.

If there's any data sets that you're particularly keen to be able to use, the best option is to either let us know at [email protected] or to contact the specific contact details / owning publication team to let them know that using an API is important for their data - that will help us to support those teams to prepare their data appropriately (and make it a priority for them).

Also, looks like you're an R user, if you haven't already, take a look at https://github.com/dfe-analytical-services/eesyapi.R (I'm just pushing an update, but by the end of the day you'll be able to install that from GitHub and more easily get data into R from the API!

I'll make an update to the docs later today making this clearer (that not all of the data in EES is automatically available in the API) - thanks for raising!

[seth-price-dfe]

ah ok, that makes sense thanks Cam! Didn't realise this was such an early stage in the project. There is no particular dataset that I anticipate needing exclusively via the API, just thought I'd try it out -- but will have to do my analysis more manually for now!

Yeah probably a good idea to state that lots of data is still inaccessible by API in the docs. Thanks!