What's New

What's new in wbdata 1.0

The 1.0 release of wbdata is not quite a full rewrite, but is pretty much the next best thing. The architecture has been reworked, function and argument names have been changed to be more consistent and clear, and a few dependencies have been added for better and more reliable functionality.

Features

  • Date arguments can now be strings, not just datetime.datetime objects. Strings can be in the year, month, or quarter formats used by the World Bank API or in any other format that can be handled by [dateparser][https://dateparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/].
  • Default cache behavior can be configured with environment variables, including the path, TTL, and max number of items to cache. See Cache Module documentation for details.
  • Users can now create Client objects if they want to set cache behavior programmatically have multiple caches, or supply their own requests Session.
  • Caching is now provided using the shelved_cache and cachetools libraries. Since a lot of annoying bugs seemed to come from wbdata's home-rolled cache implementation, this should be a good quality-of-life improvement for many people.
  • Type annotations are available.

Breaking API Changes

  • Supported version of Python are now 3.8+.

  • All of the metadata retrieval functions have been renamed to their plural forms to reflect the fact that they always return a sequence:

    Old Name New Name
    get_country get_countries
    get_indicator get_indicators
    get_incomelevel get_incomelevels
    get_lendingtype get_lendingtypes
    get_topic get_topics
    get_source get_sources

  • The functions search_countries and search_indicators have been removed. Searching by name is now available using the query parameter of the get_countries and get_indicators functions.

  • The parameter data_date has been renamed date.
  • The parameter convert_dates has been renamed parse_dates.
  • The parameter cache with a default value True has been replaced with a parameter skip_cache with a default value of False.