Best Practices for Retrieving the Most Complete (“Full”) Form ADV Filing for an Adviser

[nschmidt1979]

Hi,

I’m working with the SEC-API to pull Form ADV data for investment advisers and want to ensure I am retrieving the most complete version of an adviser’s record. I’ve noticed that:

Many filings (especially interim amendments) only contain updated fields, so the JSON or object from SEC-API may have blanks for sections that were not changed in that filing.

The annual updating amendment is supposed to be the “full” version, but it’s not always clear how to target it reliably via the API.

For downstream analysis and data pipelines, we want a record that contains all key fields for the adviser—even if some need to be “filled in” from previous filings (i.e., by looping back until all fields are populated).

Questions:

Is there a recommended query/filter or field (such as Filing.AmendmentType or similar) to reliably pull the most “complete” (annual) filing for an adviser?

Does SEC-API expose a field that marks annual amendments as such, or do you recommend retrieving the most recent filing regardless of type?

Has anyone developed a best practice for combining/merging multiple filings to fill in missing fields, and is there a canonical way to do this using the API?

Is there any roadmap or feature for providing an API endpoint that always returns the most complete/filled-out version (like a “current composite view”) for a firm?

Any guidance on this topic—or code examples from the community—would be much appreciated!

Thank you.