New Feature: Allow Pacer Document purchases using pacer_doc_id

[ERosendo]

Headline

what would an ideal headline be for a press release?

• "Pacer Document Purchases Made Easier" or "Streamline Your Workflow: Purchase Pacer Documents with Ease"

What would we want to announce?

• We would like to announce a simplified document purchasing process. By using the court identifier and document ID from PACER, our API can now automate the process, saving users valuable time.

What is the Feature?

New logic for the recap-fetch endpoint that enables users to initiate a document purchase by simply providing the court ID and Pacer document ID from a PACER link.

What Problem Might it Solve?

The current implementation of the fetch endpoint requires users to send the document ID from our database. This can be time-consuming, especially for users who have a PACER link but need to make additional API calls to retrieve the correct document ID.

For more information on the current endpoint, please refer to the documentation: https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/rest/recap/#pdf.

The new feature simplifies the process by allowing users to directly input information from their PACER link, saving time and effort.

Describe a Scenario in Which the Feature Might be Used

A user has a PACER link for a specific document they want to purchase. Instead of manually searching for the document ID using other APIs endpoints, they can directly input the court ID and Pacer document ID from the link into the fetch endpoint. Our code will then locate the matching document and initiate the purchase process.

Technical Requirements

• How hard is it to make, subjectively? Easy
• Best guess, how long would it take to make, roughly? 2-3 days

• What would it require that we do technically?

  • [ ] Add pacer_doc_id field to the PacerFetchQueue class.
  • [ ] Tweak the validate method in PacerFetchQueueSerializer to ensure both court_id and pacer_doc_id are provided by the user.
  • [ ] Update the do_pacer_fetch function to retrieve the relevant Recap document from the database before initiating the purchase process.

[mlissner]

One extra complication here is that a feature like this would allow people to buy documents from PACER for which we lack the docket. That'd make them orphan documents, which would be confusing for them, but it's probably something we can document.

One solution might be to automatically go get the docket when this happens. We could do that, I guess, by grabbing the docket number from the header of the PDF after we bought it, but, well, this is getting complicated now...