Here’s a new one on me — I am curious if other users of USPTO’s Patent Center have seen this one. “AuthApiError: Failed to fetch”.
Over the course of many decades, I have had opportunities to learn quite a few programming languages. When I am in the process of learning a new programming language, one of the ways that I measure my own progress is, have I learned how to “catch” all of the error messages that can be returned from the function calls and subroutine calls in that programming language? When a function or subroutine or procedure “returns”, have I learned to be methodical and inspect the “returned” information to see if it indicates that an error happened?
In the results of my own coding, if I see something like this stray “AuthApiError: Failed to fetch” on the human-readable results screen of my own program, what this tells me is that I have not yet fully learned the new programming language. It tells me that I need to go back to the textbook and learn more about how to trap failed procedure calls and I need to learn more about how to test the results of a function call.
When I see stuff like this stray “AuthApiError: Failed to fetch” on the front page of the USPTO web site, it tells me that the USPTO has entrusted the coding of its web site to coders who have not fully learned whatever programming language they are using.
I wish I could report that this kind of stray untrapped error message is a rare event in Patent Center. It is not. This is simply the first one that was so prominent on the human-readable page that I went to the trouble to capture a screen shot and put the screen shot into a blog article.
Consequences of failure? When I am doing my own coding for my own hobby needs, what are the consequences of having failed to learn how to be thorough about, say, trapping errors? The answer might be that my driveway sensor fails to inform me of a package delivery.
I plugged “AuthApiError” into a search engine and got lots of hits. It looks like this error has some connection with the software suite (called “okta”) that the USPTO uses to authenticate users of Patent Center. Yes, the software suite that decides who does and who does not get to see your pending and not-yet-published patent applications returned this error message. And the USPTO coder who wrote the code for this page of Patent Center … did not test for this error message being generated. Instead the error message got passed through, without being handled in any way, all the way back to the human user.
In case I am not being sufficiently direct, I think the consequences of failure for error handling for user authentication are potentially greater than for reporting a package delivery. Or to say it another way, the USPTO should hire better coders.