Ministeeriumide dokumendiregistrid

Public Document Registers (ADR)

Every Estonian public body must keep a public register of the documents it sends and receives, so citizen letters (selgitustaotlus, teabenõue, vaie, märgukiri) and a ministry's own coordination correspondence on a draft law are both findable here. The RIK-hosted ADR platform is uniform across agencies on one host: one form contract works for every adr.rik.ee register, only the agency path changes. The second host, adr.novian.ee, runs the same software but accepts only the quick search — see Access.

Access

• Agency index: GET https://adr.rik.ee/ — 54 links of the form /<agency>/, one per register.
• A second host runs the same software: https://adr.novian.ee/<slug>/, which is where most municipal registers live (21 of them). It has no index — get the slug from authority(name).register.url in asutused.mjs, never by guessing.
• The two hosts are not interchangeable. On adr.novian.ee the fielded search POST /<slug>/otsing answers HTTP 500 — every instance, every field combination, verified 2026-07-28 across saku_vald, kohila_vald and torva_linn. Use POST /<slug>/kiirotsing with input= there. adr.rik.ee serves both.

claim On `adr.novian.ee` the fielded search `POST /<slug>/otsing` answers **HTTP 500**
# Saku vald, one of the three instances the claim was verified across. The 500
# is the platform's own "Süsteemi viga!" page, not a rejected field: it is the
# same for every field combination, which is why the route is unusable here
# rather than merely fussy.
POST https://adr.novian.ee/saku_vald/otsing
body title=leping
expect-status 500
expect /Süsteemi viga!/
# The control is the quick search this guide sends instead, on the same
# instance. It must answer 200 — otherwise a novian outage would confirm the
# limitation and quietly send 21 municipal registers to a dead end.
control POST https://adr.novian.ee/saku_vald/kiirotsing
body input=leping&pageNumber=1

• Each agency serves the same two search forms at /<agency>/kiirotsing and /<agency>/otsing.
• Server-rendered HTML, no login, no JavaScript. Trailing slash on the landing page (/som/ — /som answers 301).

Common prefixes: som, ram, jm, kum, mkm, kaitseministeerium, ska, transpordiamet, ta, tja, pa, riigikohus, riigiprokuratuur, tallinnav, tartuv. Take the exact prefix from the index rather than guessing.

Retrieve

Both searches are HTML form POSTs and accept nothing else. Send Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded with a URL-encoded body. A GET with the same names in the query string, or a POST with a JSON body, returns the blank form — HTTP 200, no error, no rows. So does a misspelled field name. This is the single most common way to conclude "the register has nothing" when the request was simply never accepted as a search.

1. Fetch the index and pick the exact agency prefix.
2. Quick search across all document fields — POST /<agency>/kiirotsing:

input=magustatud&pageNumber=1

3. Fielded search — POST /<agency>/otsing. Fields: title (title only), regDateBegin / regDateEnd (dd.mm.yyyy), repeated documentTypes, party (counterparty), senderRegNr, accessRestriction (Avalik or AK), accessRestrictionReason (substring of the legal basis, e.g. AvTS), pageNumber.

accessRestrictionReason is how you get a signal out of sealed material: the content is withheld but the basis is not, so counting AvTS versus MKS seals in a date window is a coarse category tally even where every title is generic.

input is broader than title: on Sotsiaalministeerium title=Karastusjookide returns 1 row, input=Karastusjookide returns 4, party=Karastusjookide returns 3. Use title to pin a known document, input to find one you only know the actors of.

At least one field must be filled. documentTypes values are numeric and differ per agency (Sotsiaalministeerium 4945102, Justiitsministeerium 13074) — read them from that agency's own form HTML, never copy across agencies.

Paging: 20 rows per page. Re-POST every original field plus pageNumber=N; the query is not held in server state, so a bare pageNumber POST silently re-runs nothing.

Detail record: GET /<agency>/dokument/<id>. Attachments hang off it as /<agency>/fail/<fileId>/<name> — a .asice is a ZIP with the signed document inside.

This needs a form-urlencoded POST. If you cannot send one, this recipe is past your reach — say so rather than improvising a GET around it.

Return

Result rows give Viit (reference), Reg. kpv, Pealkiri, Dokumendi liik, Teised osapooled, plus the /<agency>/dokument/<id> link.

The detail record adds Funktsioon, Sari, Toimik, Juurdepääsupiirang (+ alus), Adressaat, Saabumis/saatmisviis, Vastutaja and Lahendamise tähtaeg.

• When titles are generic, Sari and Vastutaja name the topic. A Sotsiaalkindlustusamet row titled only "Vaie" resolves to Sari: 5.2-3 Vaidetoimikud and Vastutaja: … Ekspertiisitalitus …, i.e. a disability-assessment appeal.
• Lahendamise tähtaeg is the body's own answering deadline — worth reporting to a citizen who is waiting.
• Preserve agency, the query fields you sent, page, access status, source URL and retrieval time.

When the body's own register has nothing

A body's own register can be complete, empty or thin — and the ministry that governs it registers the same correspondence. Asked what documents existed about Eesti Loodusmuuseumi direktori konkurss, a run searched the museum's own 6,414-row register, found nothing about it, and drafted a teabenõue; the five documents were public in Kliimaministeerium's register the whole time.

• parentRegister(name) in asutused.mjs gives that ministry whenever ITS register is searchable, with the exact call for its platform — which is often NOT ADR. 24 of the 42 bodies with such a ministry are on this platform.
• Kokku: 0 raises this as a printed warning by itself. A thin result does not — whether the rows you got actually answer the question is your judgement, and the rule is the same.
• Only once both registers have been searched may you say the documents are not in the public register, or draft a teabenõue for them.

Limits

• Results are capped at 100. Above that the page says "Leiti rohkem tulemusi, kuvatakse esimesed 100. Palun täpsustage otsingut." — so Kokku: 100 means at least 100, not exactly 100. Never report it as a count; narrow with regDateBegin/regDateEnd instead.
• A term the platform considers too short is answered with the blank form, not with zero rows: input=a on /som/kiirotsing comes back HTTP 200 with no Kokku: line at all (2026-08-01). Same signal, same rule — that search never ran.
• Unreachable or empty as of 2026-07-27, despite being listed on the index: /ria/ and /kl/ answer 403; /hmv/ and /riigikantselei/ answer Kokku: 0 for every term and their document-type list is empty. For Government Office documents use riigikantselei-register.
• The index carries historical names and duplicate aliases for the same body (Kaitseliit as both kaitseliit and the dead kl). Report the register label actually shown.
• AK records expose registration metadata without content; an AvTS § 35 lg 1 p 11, p 12 seal runs 75 years. Counterparties who are private persons appear as initials.
• Register quality varies: Transpordiamet titles are genuinely descriptive; Sotsiaalkindlustusamet and Justiitsministeerium are title-opaque and need Sari/Vastutaja.
• Not on this platform: Tallinn — dhs.tallinn.ee/atp has its own guide, tallinn-document-register, and its own module; do not improvise from the URL here, because a search on it that is not scoped to a body returns all 273 registrars at once; TTJA (https://jvis.ttja.ee/modules/dokumendiregister/?_wbbdl=1&limit=50&offset=0 with X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest returns clean JSON, but there is no keyword search — 579,250 rows, newest first, only limit/offset); EMTA (dokumendiregister.rahandusministeerium.ee?a=mta — results are not reachable by URL, and titles have been a bare "Kiri" under 75-year seals since ~2016; treat as unavailable).

Verify

A search only succeeded if the response body contains a line Kokku: <number>.

• No Kokku: line → the request was not run as a search. The blank form and the "Otsingu tulemused" heading can both appear without it. Re-send as a form-urlencoded POST with a field name copied from the form HTML.
• Kokku: 0 (with Näitan: 0-0) → the search ran and genuinely matched nothing. Say that; do not retry the same query.
• Kokku: N with N ≥ 1 → require at least one /<agency>/dokument/<id> link before naming any document.

Known-good acceptance check, run weekly against the live register by scripts/check-sources.mjs (issue #82):

POST https://adr.rik.ee/som/otsing
body title=magustatud
expect /Kokku: [1-9]/
expect /\/som\/dokument\/\d+/
# Kokku: 7 on 2026-07-27, including "Arvamus magustatud joogi maksu seaduse
# eelnõu kohta" (1.2-3/1805-4, 02.05.2017, Eesti Karastusjookide Tootjate Liit).
# The same field sent as a GET is the blank form: HTTP 200, no Kokku: line, no
# rows. If it ever satisfies the two expects above, the Kokku: rule has stopped
# telling a search that ran from one that was never accepted.
counter GET https://adr.rik.ee/som/otsing?title=magustatud

Module API

adrSearch(body, {input, title, party, from, to, accessRestriction, reason, types, page}) -> {source, page, agency, host, ran, capped, totals, rows, note} adrDocument(body, id) -> {source, page, agency, ref, title, fields, files, related, deadline, note}