One category of recurring task in any e-filing system is what might be termed a “follow-on submission” or a “subsequently filed document”. With such a task, you somehow indicate the application number of the application in which you wish to file your document. Clearly one of the most important user interface goals is to help the user avoid an undesired result of inadvertently filing a document in the wrong application. EFS-Web gets this right. WIPO’s ePCT system gets this right. But Patentcenter fails, as may be seen from the screen shot at right. What you can see, marked with green rectangles, are the places where the developer plainly intended to display the application number, the title, the attorney docket number, the filing date, and an inventor name. But for unknown reasons, the line of code that was intended to render this text on the screen somehow came up empty.
This was first reported to the USPTO in the EFS-Web listserv on July 27, 2021 by alert user Suzannah Sundby. A month has passed and USPTO has not fixed the bug. This is Patentcenter trouble ticket number CP58.
I had this problem. Called EBC. EBC did not know what would happen if I submitted with a blank header. So I cancelled and started submission over. Lesson is to check header before uploading any documents like you would an ADS load for a new application submission.