Partial download of headers

gnvdk · Post by **gnvdk** » Mon May 09, 2005 9:01 am

I wonder whether it is possible to partially download headers from a newsgroup. Example: i would like to download a movie from a very large newsgroup with millions of headers. I know the names of the headers, and i know it is posted some days ago over a period of several days. XPAT is not supported, so i can't use that. If I download all the messages in the newsgroup, NP becomes very, very,very slow, so that doesn't work either. I there a way I can filter the headers I download, so that I only downlod the headers i need? Using a filter didn't work for me: it downloaded all the headers, just only showed the ones i needed.

alex · Post by **alex** » Tue May 10, 2005 2:27 am

maybe to look for nzb (www.binaries.nl or www.newzbin.com), if it is rare and you know approximately when the message was posted based on daily newsgroup volume you could try setting different 'last headers' and when it will be close enough to desired post just wait until it is in, download it and then set last headers to recent again.

gnvdk · Post by **gnvdk** » Tue May 10, 2005 6:13 am

Thanks for answering Alex. Alas, there is no nzb-file (in this case).

The other option will be difficult too i think: this post started last thurday up until sunday. In that time period hundreds of thousands of posts were made to that group. So if i set "last headers" to any value i still end up with too many headers to work comfortably.

I don't know whether there are other solutions, otherwise it might be a good new feature for one of the next releases of NP? The mechanism X-News uses, is a good example of how it may be implemented. It doesn't save time in downloading and of course you do download all of the headers behind the screens, but at least you get to keep a manageable number of headers after the download.

alex · Post by **alex** » Tue May 10, 2005 10:40 am

you can also define last headers to set approximate range to limit the number of examined headers + retention range e.g. 4-5 days, server can only retrieve header range, it cannot directrly retrieve by date.