Appellate Upload Support

This release follows the successful beta period of 1.2.4b, and has the beginnings of appellate PACER support for Chrome and Firefox. This is the first time Chrome has had any appellate support. As we work to get the Firefox extension back to its former glory, we're bringing Chrome along for the ride.

At this point, several parts of appellate support do not work, however we do expect the following to work on appellate courts:

• You should see blue [R] icons on any appellate PDF that was uploaded prior to November 14 (using the old Firefox extension).

• Dockets will be uploaded to the RECAP Archive, but for now you will not see blue [R] icons for these items.

  These dockets will be properly parsed and added to the database soon.

• PDFs from appellate courts are not yet being uploaded to us in this version.

Additional changes in this release include:

• We have re-added our testing framework with 89 automated tests that must pass before release.

• Better documentation for developers.

Thank you for your support of the RECAP Project.

Beginnings of appellate support

This release has the beginnings of appellate PACER support for Chrome and Firefox. At this point, the goal is to ensure that we don't cause any regressions on district court PACER. Several parts of appellate support do not work.

We do however, expect the following to work:

• All features on the district court sites should continue working.
• You should see blue [R] icons on any appellate PDF that was uploaded prior to November 14 (using the old Firefox extension).
• Dockets will be uploaded to the RECAP Archive, but for now you will not see blue [R] icons for these items. They will be properly parsed and added to the database soon. PDFs are not being uploaded to us in this version.

If you notice anything out of the ordinary, please let us know, and thank you for your support of the RECAP Project.

Fundraising release

This is just a small release. When it is installed, it will pop up a tab pointing to https://free.law/fundraisers/2017/recap/. That page talks about the successes we've had in 2017, and requests a donation from our users.

No other functional changes included.

Parser improvements

Lots of little changes in this version to make RECAP more reliable:

1. We now use the goDLS javascript function in the PACER pages to extract the case and document IDs, and use URLs as a fallback. This will be more reliable for merged dockets and in general.

2. We have improved our URL parsers for document and case IDs.

3. Support for show_doc links is now back so we can better support websites like Plainsite, that rely on them.

4. We've fixed how we serve PDF files for users that prefer to use an external PDF viewer. On Chrome, we're able to make this work for you automatically. In Firefox, if you want to have good file names while using an external PDF viewer, you'll see a new option to "Force external PDF viewing (download PDFs)" (this option is only available in Firefox — in chrome it's set automatically depending on your settings):

We've also made tweaks to CourtListener that will make uploading work more consistently. Between this upgrade and the tweaks to CourtListener, we expect to capture many more of the documents that are uploaded.

Thanks to @johnhawkinson, and all of our testers.

External PDF Support

Only two new features in this version:

1. There is a new option that allows you to use an external PDF handler. If you're somebody that doesn't like the built in PDF tools in your browser, and you've been experiencing random file names when you download items, enable this check box and you should get improved file names.

2. The version number is now displayed in the options panel.

Better docket history handling

Three small changes today:

1. A backend change to make it easier to capture docket history reports.

2. Enhancements to the options page.

3. All console logs from the extension are prepended with "RECAP".

Updates notifications

This change is a minor one that simply updates notifications so that they work properly again. Chrome continues changing this API and we continue playing catch up.

So it goes,

Mike

Minor release to add tracking endpoint

There's a certain URL that used to exist on PACER, which we think has been deprecated by the AO. This release lets us track whether that URL still exists. If it doesn't, we'll cheerfully drop support for it in a few weeks.

Tests getting better.

This release has two major things:

1. The testing framework is getting more and more robust thanks to the hard work of @audiodude.
2. Bug freelawproject/recap#137 is fixed, making replaceState and pushState work properly in the newest versions of Chrome.

Teams are go!

Minor update today to bring the team feature to the fore and to roll out a version with vastly improved testing system, thanks to @audiodude.

Details will appear in the Free Law Project blog.