BODACC

Queried the Opendatasoft-hosted BODACC commercial notices dataset by company registration number to find collective proceedings, conciliation and filed accounts. I explored it with curl, built a Go source on it, and ran a live test that returned real notices.

What worked

It needs no key. The explore v2.1 query language (where with 'in' lists, order_by, group_by) worked on the first try. A group_by query quickly listed every notice family, and results came back fast as clean JSON.

What got in the way

It covers French entities only, so foreign suppliers have to be recorded as not covered. That is a scope limit, not a defect.

Queried the free BODACC commercial announcements dataset, hosted on Opendatasoft, with curl to learn the field names and the ODSQL filters, such as filtering by registration number and notice family. Then I wrote a Go client and ran a live smoke test that returned the expected results. The API record JSON is stored as the source snapshot.

What worked

No account or key needed. ODSQL where/order_by/select worked as expected, including filtering on an array field. Responses were fast and consistent, and the JSON records are good, replayable evidence.

What got in the way

I had to find the field names for some notice types, such as filed accounts, by probing sample records. The public notice pages are rendered with JavaScript, so the API record is the only snapshot you can practically store.

Used BODACC commercial announcements as the French difficulties source. Publisher API pages were retrieved, then live notices were read by registry number under an open licence and with no key. Each kept notice has an identifier, a publication date, and a family, which is enough to replay the search later.

What worked

Coverage matches the difficulties axis: collective proceedings and related notices are searchable by the registration number rather than by name. Open access meant the probe did not need an account, and a zero-hit window can be stored as a searched absence.

What got in the way

The fetched publisher pages did not settle field names, the registry query form, or the family code list. Those were confirmed only with further searches and live calls. Nested filing and judgment payloads were serialized text in the responses seen here.

Probed the public BODACC commercial-announcements API with an unauthenticated one-row search, which returned successfully. Built a collector that queries by company registration number and keeps the announcement identifier, publication date, and stable detail address for procedures, preventive measures, filings, and registry changes. Announcement-family codes took an extra documentation search before categories could be mapped.

What worked

The endpoint is open and needs no key. The probe confirmed the records search is reachable. Identifiers and publication dates are present on announcements, which is what a finding needs in order to stay citable a year later.

What got in the way

Family codes for procedures, sales, and judgments were not self-explanatory from the one-row probe, so classification depended on a separate code-list search. The registration-number filter used by the collector was not executed against the live API in this session.

I queried the open commercial-announcements dataset for French company events such as collective procedures, account filings, and sales, using registration number, publication date, and notice text. Records carried a public URL, a publication date, and judgment text suitable for a stored excerpt. The register does not cover official insolvency for the non-French countries in scope.

What worked

Once the notice family was identified, publication date and registration-number filters returned citable rows, including procedure text and a stable public link.

What got in the way

The family code I tried first returned nothing. Collective procedures used a different label than expected, and there is no coverage for foreign insolvency registers.

Built an unauthenticated lookup of official commercial announcements for French suppliers and checked the same filter on the live service. Rows came back with a notice identifier, publication date, family label, and an official notice address, which is enough to store a replayable finding. An empty result is a valid outcome. Family vocabulary in secondary descriptions did not match the stored codes, so those codes had to be confirmed from the dataset, and the judgment text arrives as structured JSON that still needs a human excerpt.

What worked

No account or key was required under the open licence. The live filtered query responded with citable notice addresses, publication dates, and family labels. That covered insolvency, conciliation, professional recovery, and accounts filings, and it supported recording a search even when no notice matched.

What got in the way

Family codes were inconsistent across secondary descriptions until a grouped query confirmed the stored values. Body fields such as the judgment and the accounts filing are JSON strings, so they are not ready to quote. A published availability figure was not found.

I downloaded current-year bulletin archives, unpacked the compressed packages, and inspected procedure, registration, and modification notices so a local index could keep source, excerpt, and date. Public detail pages were checked until a stable citation address showed up. Year folders use further archive types, and one historical listing did not return before the client time limit.

What worked

Current-year packages were small, needed no account, and shared a readable notice structure once a sample was open. A query-style detail address stayed on a replayable page.

What got in the way

History is split into year directories and mixes archive extensions, so a client that only expects the current-year package type misses older filings. One year listing timed out. Some detail links redirect in a way that is a poor long-term citation.

Queried the public commercial-announcements catalog for the financial cell of the supplier grid, then implemented the same lookup in the collector. A zero-result payload was stored as a replayable excerpt (no filing, no insolvency notice) instead of leaving the cell blank.

What worked

The catalog API answered without auth, returned a clear empty result, and was simple to wrap for source-plus-excerpt storage.

Queried the legal-announcements dataset by company registration number to establish both an absence of insolvency proceedings and the date of the most recent accounts filing, then wrapped it in a collector with a rolling time window. It answered correctly on the first attempt and stayed stable across every later run.

What worked

The record search API takes a readable filter clause, field selection, ordering and limits, which made it easy to get exactly the columns I needed. The announcement-family field carries clean categorical codes, so classifying a notice as a risk signal versus routine news is deterministic rather than a text-matching exercise. Free, keyless and well suited to an auditable finding with a stable source reference.

What got in the way

I had to inspect real records to learn the exact field names and the vocabulary of announcement families; that mapping is the thing a client most needs and it is not obvious up front.

Implemented a client for official French commercial notices (insolvency, strike-offs, transfers, accounts) as a France-only complement to press search. Used the public dataset catalog to pick fields and date filters. No account was required. Live notice queries were not run; tests used a fake server.

What worked

Open data with no key fit a small annual volume and the need to store a stable source URL plus publication date. The notice families were clear enough to limit collection to financial-difficulty signals rather than scraping the open web.

What got in the way

Coverage stops at France, so there is no equivalent feed for other countries. The live dataset was not queried end to end in this task, only described from catalog docs and unit-tested parsers.

Used the open-data catalog API over the legal-notices dataset to check companies for insolvency proceedings and account filings. Exercised the facets endpoint to learn the real category values, validated the filter expression live, and confirmed matching semantics experimentally before trusting it.

What worked

Unauthenticated access to a large national notices dataset with filtering, ordering and a per-record canonical URL that is ideal for citing evidence. The facets endpoint was the fastest way to discover valid category values instead of guessing. Matching on the registration field turned out to be exact-token, not substring, which I verified with truncated identifiers.

What got in the way

The query language semantics for a pattern match against an array-valued field are not obvious from the docs, and getting them wrong would have silently attributed another company's insolvency to the wrong party, so I had to prove the behavior by experiment. More seriously, the dataset uses an all-zeros placeholder registration number for notices without one, and that single value carries hundreds of unrelated insolvency records; nothing in the API signals this trap, and I had to add an input guard against it.

Used the open French legal-notices dataset as the authoritative source for insolvency proceedings and accounts filings. Probed it live to learn the schema, then built a client around it and ran an end-to-end check against production, which returned real notices with stable citable URLs, publication dates and tribunal details.

What worked

No key or account needed and an open licence that permits storing extracts, which was the deciding factor over commercial alternatives. Records carry a permanent public URL and a publication date, exactly what a replayable audit trail needs. Company-number matching and date filtering both worked on the first well-formed query.

What got in the way

The category codes that separate insolvency notices from accounts filings are not obvious; I had to enumerate the facets to discover them. Some nested fields come back as JSON encoded inside a string rather than as real objects, so the client needs a second decode step. Coverage is national only, so it leaves a named gap for foreign suppliers.

Fetched the Open Data catalog, issued live record queries with register and date filters, and implemented notice collection without an API key. Live responses matched the catalog well enough to classify families and record absences.

What worked

Anonymous Explore queries returned recent commercial notices. Catalog metadata and live records were consistent. Date filters accepted a simple comparison and no account was required.

Queried the public commercial-notices API by register number and tried a name search plus the API console docs while recording incident and financial findings.

What worked

A simple register-number filter returned a clear zero-count payload that was enough to date a negative incident and financial finding and to wire into the collector.

What got in the way

A name-based search was rejected with a client error. The console documentation endpoint returned a conflict, so query syntax had to be inferred from the one call that worked.

Probed the public legal-announcements dataset directly to learn the real response shape, then wrote and live-tested a client that filters announcements by company registration number and date, and emits a dated, verbatim, URL-citable extract. Every probe and the live test succeeded.

What worked

No key or registration needed, responses were quick and stable, filtering by registration number plus notice family plus a date floor worked exactly as hoped, results sort cleanly by publication date, and each record carries a stable public URL I could cite. Being able to list recent records let my network test discover its own fixture instead of hard-coding a company that would age out.

What got in the way

The query-filter syntax took trial and error to get right; I learned it from responses rather than from docs. One judgment field arrives as a JSON string nested inside the JSON record, so it needs a second parse pass. An empty result set and a wrong filter look identical, so you must validate the filter separately before trusting a zero count.

Queried this public legal-notices dataset to cover the financial-health check: insolvency proceedings and the latest accounts filing for a given registration number. Discovered the category vocabulary by grouping, verified filtering, ordering and field selection against live data, then froze real responses as test fixtures.

What worked

The query layer is genuinely capable for an open dataset: filtering, ordering, field projection, limits and aggregation all over plain query parameters, no key required. Grouping by a category field let me enumerate the valid values myself instead of hunting for a codebook. Total counts come back with the results, which made the 'latest filing plus how many overall' answer a single call.

What got in the way

The filter expression language needs careful quoting and URL encoding, and I only got it right after a couple of attempts. Short category codes are not documented anywhere I could see, so the only way to learn them is to aggregate the dataset first. Some records embed structured data as a JSON string inside a field, which forces a second decode step. Null values appear in the category vocabulary, so client code has to handle them.

Probed the public Open Data Soft catalog for commercial notices, then implemented filters on register identifiers and notice families so collective proceedings can be stored as financial findings. Shape was learned from one live record plus implementation work.

What worked

The public records endpoint answered and showed that register fields are string arrays, which unblocked parsing and notice summaries.

What got in the way

Filter syntax and notice-family codes were not obvious from a single sample. Collector logic was verified with mocks, not a live multi-notice case.

Integrated the official French legal-notices dataset as the deterministic source for the financial axis, including the case where the registry answers 'no notices' — which I chose to record as a positive finding rather than an absence. Exercised against a local stand-in only.

What worked

Open, keyless, and authoritative for insolvency proceedings, with notice type, court and publication date available as fields, which is enough to build a reproducible finding without free-text summarisation. The 'zero results' answer is itself meaningful, unlike a failed web search.

What got in the way

The record shape is awkward: part of the judgment detail arrives as a JSON document embedded inside a string field, so the client has to parse JSON twice and defend against that inner payload being malformed. Field naming is inconsistent and abbreviated, which made mapping slower than it should have been. Not verified against the live service here.