eCourts Party Case Scraper

What does eCourts Party Case Scraper do?

eCourts Party Case Scraper searches public Indian court cases by petitioner or respondent name through the official eCourts services form. It can also return the live state, district, court-complex, and establishment dropdown values needed to define a narrower search.

Search mode expands every omitted location level, searches every resulting concrete court location, combines all case rows, and removes duplicates found at more than one location. It does not stop after the first court that returns a case.

Why use this Actor?

• Search one verified court or cascade across a district, state, or all live locations.
• Resolve an unsuffixed complex code to its full live eCourts value.
• Treat a full @N complex as concrete and expand every establishment for an @Y complex when estCode is omitted.
• Deduplicate cross-location rows by CNR, public view-history identity, or a stable fallback fingerprint.
• Resume unfinished locations after retryable upstream failures without re-emitting cases already collected in an earlier browser session.
• Receive per-location outcomes and explicit valid-empty, partial, and failed upstream states in the OUTPUT record.

Prerequisite: configure the CAPTCHA solver secret

Search mode uses the configured external CodingFrontend CAPTCHA solver. Add CAPTCHA_API_KEY as a secret environment variable in the Actor settings. The key is not accepted as ordinary Actor input and is never written to logs, dataset rows, or OUTPUT.

Optional environment overrides are CAPTCHA_API_URL, CAPTCHA_MODEL_ID, and CAPTCHA_API_TIMEOUT_MS. These settings are environment-only so a run input cannot redirect the solver credential to another endpoint. Location modes do not require the solver.

How to use the Actor

For a scoped search, use the location modes in order:

1. get_states
2. get_districts with stateCode
3. get_complexes with stateCode and districtCode
4. get_establishments for a complex whose full value ends in @Y
5. search with partyName, registrationYear, caseStatus, and any desired location scope

Search location fields are optional. Omitting estCode searches all establishments for an @Y complex. Omitting complexCode, districtCode, or stateCode expands that level and every level beneath it.

Invalid modes, missing mode-specific fields, malformed registration years, and inconsistent location hierarchies are rejected before any proxy or browser session is created.

Example for Delhi (26), South East/Saket (11):

{
  "mode": "search",
  "partyName": "Sharma",
  "registrationYear": "2025",
  "caseStatus": "Both",
  "stateCode": "26",
  "districtCode": "11",
  "complexCode": "1260012@1,2,3,4@Y",
  "maxCaptchaRetries": 3,
  "maxSessionAttempts": 30,
  "cascadeReserveAttempts": 60,
  "cascadeRetryCycles": 5,
  "cascadeRetryDelayMs": 30000,
  "proxyCountryFallbacks": ["GB", "US", "IN"]
}

The Actor also accepts snake-case aliases such as party_name, registration_year, state_code, and complex_code for API compatibility.

Reliability behavior

Only one browser session and one eCourts request sequence are active at a time. Within a session, state, cookies, application token, rendered CAPTCHA, location controls, and form submission stay together. A retryable gateway, CAPTCHA, proxy, or transport failure closes that browser before a fresh sticky route is created.

The default retry budget is 30 base sessions plus 60 cascade-reserve sessions per cycle, with up to five complete cycles and a 30-second cooldown between cycles. Apify Proxy country routes cycle through GB, US, and IN by default; custom proxyUrls are used as supplied without country overrides. Successful cascade locations remain complete across session rotation, and dataset rows are written only once from the final unique aggregate.

What data does it extract?

Search dataset rows can include:

Field	Description
caseTypeNumberYear	Case type, number, and year displayed by eCourts
caseType, caseNumber, caseYear	Parsed case-number components
petitioner, respondent, advocate	Public case-party and advocate text
cnrNumber	Public CNR identifier when exposed
viewHistoryParams	Public parameters from the result's view control
_location	Concrete state, district, full complex, and establishment where the row was first found
searchPartyName, searchRegistrationYear, searchCaseStatus	Search criteria
searchStateCode, searchDistrictCode, searchComplexCode, searchEstCode	Concrete search location

Location modes produce their corresponding code/name rows. get_complexes returns both the parsed complex_code and exact complex_code_full value. Unavailable optional case fields are omitted recursively from dataset rows; the Actor does not emit blank strings, empty collections, or placeholder text.

Output and result states

The default dataset contains every unique case or requested location row. The OUTPUT key-value record contains aggregate counts, locationIterations, session diagnostics, and these result-state fields:

• A completed search with no matching cases has success: true, found: false, and dataAvailable: true.
• A completed cascade with cases has success: true and the unique count in totalCases.
• A cascade with usable results but exhausted locations has partialSuccess: true, success: false, and dataAvailable: true.
• A complete upstream failure has success: false, found: false, and dataAvailable: false; the Actor run fails after saving the diagnostic OUTPUT record.

How much does it cost?

Cost depends primarily on browser duration, proxy traffic, solver calls, and the number of concrete locations. A court- or district-scoped search is much smaller than an all-India cascade. Use the narrowest scope that meets your purpose and a schedule permitted by the source service.

Responsible use and support

This Actor extracts records exposed by the public eCourts service. Use it only for a legitimate purpose and in accordance with applicable law, source terms, rate limits, and data-protection obligations. Avoid unnecessary broad searches or republishing personal data. Use the Actor's Issues tab for reproducible bug reports, excluding credentials and sensitive proxy details.