Add a button to download all PDFs in a case

[mlissner]

Headline

New feature: Now you can download all the PDFs for any federal case in a single click

What is the Feature?

We currently have a button on every case that you can use to download the metadata for that case. A user is also requesting that we add a button to download all the PDFs in a case (as a zip).

What Problem Might it Solve?

Some users want to have all the PDFs locally. This will make that easy to accomplish.

Describe a Scenario in Which the Feature Might be Used

A lawyer might use this to download the entirety of a case.

Technical Requirements

• How hard is it to make, subjectively? Easy
• Best guess, how long would it take to make, roughly? 3 days
• What would it require that we do technically?
  • Query all of the docket entries for a case to find which have PDFs
  • Download all of the PDFs locally (in parallel)
  • Put them in a zip
  • Put the zip somewhere for the user
  • Email the user with a link to the zip

Existing Systems or Alternatives?

I'm told people just do it by hand. There's also an extension that makes it possible to download all the PDFs for a particular entry:

Otherwise, I don't think there's an easy way to do this.

Any Additional Information?

Here's the quote from the user:

Recently, you put a button on each docket to download the text of the entries in a csv file. We loved that and appreciate it. Could you ask your dev team if they could build in a similar button to download all PDFs which have already been put into the Recap system into a single zip file? We often find ourselves clicking "Download Linked File" over 200 times in order to download the entire docket so we can get up to speed on a case. Please consider this.

People will try to use this to scrape content, so this will need some limitations:

• How many downloads per day?
• How many files per zip?
• How many MB per zip? This is important because big cases could exhaust the memory of a given pod if we do this in memory (maybe we just don't allow downloads on such cases, or we just provide a CSV with the links and an explanation?)

I can't think of a particularly scalable way to do this since zips tend to need to be in memory, but perhaps there's a way to do this that I'm not aware of.

[mlissner]

Oh, also: This could integrate nicely into the existing button, so this is a new feature and an enhancement.