RFAIs that reference a Statement of Organization not listed with committee's Statements of Organization

[jwchumley]

@bmathesonFEC commented on Tue Dec 19 2017

RFAIs that reference the Statement of Organization are not being listed among committee's the Statements of Organization on the committee's Filings page. I would expect RFAIs that reference Statements of Organization to be listed in the same way that RFAIs referencing "Regularly Filed Reports" are listed among their corresponding reports.

Here's an example: https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00637983/?tab=filings

This committee's two RFAIs referencing their Statement of Organizations are not listed there. However, they are listed here: https://www.fec.gov/data/filings/?data_type=processed&committee_id=C00646646&cycle=2018

Let me know if I can answer any question about this, Brad

---

@AmyKort commented on Tue Dec 19 2017

Thanks, Brad! cc-ing @PaulClark2 and @llienfec for visibility.

---

@bmathesonFEC commented on Tue Dec 19 2017

@AmyKort That was fast! Thanks.

Let me add another wrinkle to this particular committee's page. I think I successfully attached an image to this comment showing that the "Regularly Filed Reports" section says "Showing 1 to 8 of 8 Entries" but it only displays 3. I think 3 is the accurate number of items that should be listed in that section.

[llienfec]

As a part of future work, can we add F1 RFAIs to the F1 section on the committee filings page? With so much information on these pages, I think users expect that all the documents are listed here. If a filer didn't see a letter on a committee page, they may assume the letter didn't exist rather than going to the larger search.

The wonderful @lbeaufort has encountered a similar task to this before, so she may know if this is possible and what effort it would take. Not an emergency, but something to fit in as we plan future work.

Content team could also do an inventory and see if there are other document types that show up in the Advanced filter/all filings that didn't make it over to the committee pages, just to understand what else is out there.

[patphongs]

Fixed the problem with the Form 1 RFAIs missing from the committee's filings, it's in this PR https://github.com/18F/fec-cms/pull/1706. It was requested, however, that we group the RFAIs that reference form 1 with the statement of organization. However, after reviewing the code, it is a lot more difficult to implement this given the current abilities of our API.

A possible easier solution would be to refactor the RFAIs to their own section that is separate from the Regularly filed reports section. What do you think @llienfec ?

[patphongs]

Talked at length with @LindsayYoung and @pkfec about this ticket. Datatables currently only allows us to make 1 API call per table, and lots of re-engineering on the front-end would have to happen if we wanted to make an API call and then strip out data from datatables before it gets painted on the screen. We decided that it would be best to add a more robust functionality to the API in which we can add an exclude argument to the call to achieve what we need. This would allow us to add an extra argument to the API call that would exclude request_type=1 or exclude request_type=2.

[lbeaufort]

Closed in favor of https://github.com/18F/fec-cms/issues/1760, which is more comprehensive