Bills Database

This data set contains information on bills considered by the Council since 1844. It consists of the key dates relating to the passage of a bill, relevant papers and reports of the bill and the Bills Committee, as well as hyperlinks to the Bill's deliberations in Council meetings. For use of the data provided by the Legislative Council, please note the disclaimer and copyright notice.

The information can be obtained in the form of open data via web application programming interface (API) as described in this page.

For enquiry, please e-mail to enquiry@legco.gov.hk.

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Usage tips of Web Application Programming Interface (API)

Note:

When Chinese characters are used in a web api command, please perform URL encoding for it first, or use a browser such as Chrome that can encode Chinese characters automatically.
The following commands will return the whole set of data and the total size is over 15MB. Waiting time should be considered (depending on the network speed).

The open data web api can be run at:

https://app.legco.gov.hk/BillsDB/odata/Vbills (JSON format)
https://app.legco.gov.hk/BillsDB/odata/Vbills?$format=xml (XML format)

To get the meta data schema of the dataset, please run the following:

https://app.legco.gov.hk/BillsDB/odata/$metadata

The following query string options can be applied:

$format - specify whether the data to be returned in json or xml format, e.g. $format=json
$top=N - select only the first N entries of the set, where N is a positive integer, e.g. $top=10
$skip=N - select only the remaining entries (starting with Entry N+1) where N is a positive integer, e.g. $skip=10
$orderby - what values are used to order the retrieved data, e.g. $orderby=bill_title_eng
$select - select specific fields to be returned, e.g. $select=bill_title_eng,bill_title_chi,bill_gazette_date
$filter - select specific entries according to provided conditions, e.g. $filter=year(bill_gazette_date) eq 2013
$inlinecount - specify "$inlinecount=allpages" to include the total number of records in the returned data