Request not leading to CLIENT.AmbiguousRequest anymore

[Chris Every]

Hi there,

we have noticed that the web service behaves differently than used to do. The test we wrote worked with version 3.0 in June 2012.

We do the following request
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/family/publication/docdb/WO.9944063.*/legal

In the past we received an error when performing this request. That error was made up as follows
code 413
message CLIENT.AmbiguousRequest

Now we get one response with a list of patent family members. But those patent family members belong to different patent families. We can see this, as not all have the same patent family id.

The request above leads to 56 family members.

• Family ID 22129137 appears 28 times
• Family ID 26757494 appears 13 times
• Family ID 26803238 appears 11 times
• Family ID 26757495 appears 4 times

We do have code that handled the ambiguous error, now those tests fail and the application behaves differently. Is this intended behaviour on your side or probably an error?

[EPO / OPS Support]

Dear user,

Since you are looking up WO number you should not get any ambiguous requests anyway (same goes for EP, where all publication stages keep same publication number and just the kind code will change).

Legal services is all about extended patent family (Inpadoc family) and not simple Docdb family (Espacenet calls it Espacenet family). This is the reason why your result list shows you family ID's from different and sometimes the same simple patent families.

For rules on extended family versus simple family see: http://www.epo.org/searching/essentials ... ilies.html

Kind regards,
OPS support

[Chris Every]

Thank you for your reply.

We have changed our tests to use the request
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/legal/publication/docdb/JP.S5582191.*

This provokes the error we want to test.