9th Circuit Dockets/Documents Not Uploading to RECAP

[pixelfelon]

Recently (sometime shortly after Nov. 24th), visiting a docket (summary or full) on PACER/ACMS for the 9th circuit specifically does not cause the docket to be uploaded to RECAP. The "full docket" button at the top looks different than it used to so I suppose this is some update on the court's side that broke the RECAP extension. RECAP still works in the 11th circuit.

Here's a randomly chosen case that has this issue:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71925176/lopez-et-al-v-apple-inc/

I have just viewed the full docket on PACER with RECAP but only the first four documents are shown on CourtListener.
This happens both when I search for the case directly in PACER, and when I click the view on PACER button.

Additionally, when viewing a document from that docket, I don't get any notification that it has been uploaded to RECAP.

I am using RECAP extension v2.8.5 in Firefox 145.0.1 on Windows 11 25H2.

[mlissner]

Thanks James. Looks like they are making life difficult, but at least they're working on the platform! We'll take a look.

[ERosendo]

I think this issue is related to freelawproject/courtlistener#6614.

I took a quick look at ACMS, and it seems they recently did a major refactor. It’s no longer using Vue.js, and I noticed some HTMX tags, which suggests they’ve moved to server-side rendering. We’ll likely need to rework our logic to align with the new architecture.

[ERosendo]

I’ve been reviewing the ACMS docket report after the refactor and noticed that they now expose a public object in the DOM containing all the case information. This new object is called showDocViewModel.

The object is injected via one of the HTMX fragments. Here is a screenshot of the request responsible for adding it to the DOM:

Before the refactor, we relied on some data stored in session storage, along with additional workarounds to extract more information directly from the HTML/Vue virtual DOM.

I haven’t done a full comparison of the data yet, but it looks very similar to what we were previously using.

[mlissner]

That's fantastic news. They're actually making PACER into an API without saying so.