R function to query CMS data via API

getCMS.R

getCMS <- function(distributionId,
                   columns = "*",
                   where = NULL,
                   limit = 0,
                   root = "https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/api/1/datastore/sql")
{
  require(magrittr)
  require(httr)
  require(jsonlite)
  if (is.null(where)) {
    query <- sprintf("[SELECT %s FROM %s][LIMIT %d]", columns, distributionId, limit)
  } else {
    query <- sprintf("[SELECT %s FROM %s][WHERE %s][LIMIT %d]", columns, distributionId, where, limit)
  }
  options <- "show_db_columns=true"
  url <- sprintf("%s?query=%s&%s", root, query, options) %>% URLencode()
  GET(url)$content %>% rawToChar() %>% fromJSON()
}

# EXAMPLE
# getCMS("10ab1332-3857-537a-8ffa-cbe91dbe4c65", where = 'state = \"OR\"')

• Is it possible to automate grabbing distributionId? Currently, user needs to know distributionId ahead of time, navigating to the data.cms.gov webpage for the data set. Would be nice if there was a catalog to look up.