XPAT search probs

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harmenmeijer
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Mar 06, 2003 1:13 pm

XPAT search probs

Post by harmenmeijer »

I have been using the trial version for one month now an like Newspro quite a lot. It could be more user-friendly but it does the job without crashing.
I have one problem I can't resolve: If I do an XPAT search on my ISP newsserver I get headers. Often (but not always!) these headers give me a "420 No such article" error. If I do the same thing with XNews (XPat search & save attachments) it always works fine! Why I asked myself. I have been reading the previous forum and found it could be due to some index of article id's my ISP maintains which might be to kept too small (whatever). If that is the case I should complain to my ISP, and I will, but I know upfront that won't help. They are not that willing to do anything. Sadly enough they have some newsgroups not available on other servers. Anyway: what causes this problem and can Newspro be made to function better (like XNews) on this matter?

Also, Xnews Xpat searches are faster on the same search/server; why?
And, "get new headers" in a search group does not seem to do an XPat search on "new" headers but always seems to do a search on all headers.

I mention XNews a lot but it really sucks bigtime if you've use Newspro or BNR. It just handles XPAT searches in a friendly manner.

Harmen
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

The speed of xpat should be the same, just if you have many newsgroups to look in, the time increases proportionally.

Because of the capability of searching in many newsgroups newspro doesn't keep article numbers along with newsgroup names, only the message-id (otherwise it becomes messy to handle, since these are not just subscribed newsgroups) for a normally working server it is not a problem to retrieve an article by message-id (it is a basic command).

Try to report the problem - their message-id index is corrupt, it is just a (most probably temporary) problem with the server.

Still there is a rationale to keep the newsgroup names, but it means more complex implementation, to have all newsgroups indexed, not just subscribed, maybe it will eventually happen, although not within the current development line.
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