Iowa Code MCP server

@pipeworx/iowa-code

Iowa Code — state statutes by citation, historical edition, amendment history, and chapter/section topic search. Keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1704+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

citation ("714.2" is degrees of theft; "321J.2" is OWI). Returns the statute text, its amendment history and referredtoin cross-references as separate fields, and (via year) a historical edition back to 2000.

• iacodesection(section, year?) — full text of an Iowa Code section by

chapter-number ranges, for routing a subject to the right chapter range.

• iacodetitles() — the 16 titles of the Code with official names and

own official chapter and section captions (not full statutory text — see below), returning matching citations.

• iacodesearch(query, limit?) — topic/keyword search over the Code's

Auth

Keyless.

The survey trap did not apply here

The August state-law survey's recorded trap was "published only as PDF" — but legis.iowa.gov serves every chapter of the Iowa Code as a plain RTF file, for every archived year (2000, then 2004 through the current year; 2001-2003 are genuinely missing from the site's own year picker):

https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/code/2026/714.rtf   (current edition)
https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/code/2015/714.rtf   (a historical edition)

A cleaner per-chapter XML export also exists (/docs/publications/ICC/2026/attachments/714_slim.xml), but verified live 2026-10-06 it 404s for every year except the current one — even though the chapter-listing page for every past year keeps linking it. That is a dead link on the Legislature's own site, not a probe mistake. RTF is therefore the one path used here, for every year including the current one, decoded by a small dependency-free RTF-to-text reader written for this file shape (shared/src/statute-rtf.ts, verified against both the 2026 and 2015 editions of chapter 714).

(Note for anyone cross-referencing today's batch: Kentucky landed a dependency-free PDF extractor the same day, shared/src/pdf-text.ts. Iowa never needed it — RTF covers every year here — but it's the thing to reach for if a future state really is PDF-only.)

Citations

Iowa cites by chapter.section, e.g. "714.2" (degrees of theft) or "321J.2" (OWI). The chapter is the part before the dot and may itself carry letters ("714A", "6B", "321J") — not every chapter is a bare number.

Topic search is caption search, not full text

Iowa does not publish a general subject index of the Code (verified 2026-10-06: no INDEX.pdf/index.pdf under /docs/code/2026/), and the Iowa Legislature's own publications search engine does not index Code section text at all — its own facet tree covers bills, fiscal notes, administrative bulletins and rules, but has no "Iowa Code" category. iacodesearch instead matches a query against the official chapter and section CAPTIONS every listing page already carries ("714 - THEFT, FRAUD, AND RELATED OFFENSES", "714.1 - Theft defined.") — real, live, and self-updating, but bounded by whatever words the Legislature chose for a caption. A plain-language query that doesn't share vocabulary with the official caption (e.g. "security deposit" vs. the statute's own "rental deposits") can rank a false-positive chapter above the right one; the tool description says so.

Data sources

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.