Bankruptcy Court Compatibility

[zhangchuck]

Theoretically, pacer_lib should work with bankruptcy court data, but we have never tested it on bankrutpcy results (brought to our attention by KW). There is a small difference in the bankruptcy result page (it has a [Ch] column rather than a [NOS] column).

We should find some way to integrate these two, either with a bankruptcy switch, or some way of blindly recording all of the columns.

I assume there may be similar issues with non-civil courts as well that we will need to address in the future.

-cz

@synsypa

[zhangchuck]

We had to specify some special payload options for Illinois Bankruptcy court; specifically they use "date_type" as a field, rather than "date_range_type" and they also require the case number to be passed as "case_num". We may need to add a switch for Bankruptcy courts.

if not payload:
            payload = {     'date_type':'Filed',
                            'list_of_member_cases':'on',
                            'list_of_parties_and_counsel':'on',
                            'terminated_parties':'on',
                            'page_count':'on',
                            'output_format':'html',
                            'sort1':'oldest date first'}
        # Set case dependent options
        payload['all_case_ids'] = case_value
        payload['CaseNum_' + case_value] = 'on'
        payload['case_num'] = case_no

[zhangchuck]

To get the full history, it looks like you also need to set a 'date_from' field -- the workaround is to set it to an abnormally early date (payload['date_from'] = '1/1/1900')

[zhangchuck]

It looks like Bankruptcy Courts, Appellate Courts and Districts Courts run three different versions of the CM/ECF system (see http://www.pacer.gov/psco/cgi-bin/links.pl; hover over the version number), which may explain why we need a different payload.