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There's nothing I like more than a little open data and transparency! This Val shows you how to use the California Secretary of State Business Search as a faux-API and get notifications when records change. This lets you know when a business updates their records, changes their good-standing status, and so on.
Here's how to use it:
- Fork this val
- Open the California Secretary of State Search.
- Open your browser's inspector tools.
- Search for the business you're interested in, and click on its header row.
- Now, in the network tab of your developer tools, you should see a request that ends with
false. You'll find a number in that URL. Plug that number into the val at the spot at the top.
(We're almost there!)
Now just run the val and you should get a notification! If you want to get these intermittently, schedule the val. It's probably not necessary to run this more than once a week - businesses update these details very infrequently.
- opencorporates has a way better system for open data around businesses, but to get a free API key you need to be a nonprofit or a registered journalist, and I am neither. But if you are, use that!
- Thanks to America's laws around business registration, it's commonplace for businesses to mask their control and ownership by using registration agents and a few layers of corporate structure.
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import { fetch } from "https://esm.town/v/std/fetch";
let { californiaBusinessNotificationsLast } = await import("https://esm.town/v/tmcw/californiaBusinessNotificationsLast");
export const californiaBusinessNotifications = (async () => {
const { parse } = await import("https://deno.land/x/xml/mod.ts");
const res: any = await fetch(
"https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/api/FilingDetail/business/4603/false",
{
headers: {
Accept: "*/*",
"Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate, br",
"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0",
},
},
).then((r) => r.text()).then(parse);
const list = res.DRAWER.DRAWER_DETAIL_LIST.DRAWER_DETAIL.map((detail) => {
return `## ${detail.LABEL}${detail.ALERT_YN ? " (alert)" : ""}
${detail.VALUE}`;
});
const lastValue = new Set(
californiaBusinessNotificationsLast || [],
);
let newEntries = [];
let removedEntries = [];
for (let val of list) {
if (!lastValue.has(val)) {
newEntries.push(val);
}
}
for (let val of lastValue.values()) {
if (!list.includes(val)) {
removedEntries.push(val);
}
}
californiaBusinessNotificationsLast = list;
if (newEntries.length || removedEntries.length) {
console.email(
`
Removed entries:
${removedEntries.join("\n\n")}
New entries:
${newEntries.join("\n\n")}`,
`Change in California business records!`,
);
}
return list;
})();
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