Attachments not always decoded

[voripteth]

This is somewhat sporatic behavior that I've observed so it could very well be pilot error.

I typically download binary articles with the "Download & Save Attachment" command. I'm prompted for a save directory and everything is terrific. Unfortunately I'm finding that ocassionally I have articles that are downloaded but not saved into files. Note that I haven't changed the "auto-save" function from the default but the original message was downloaded hours ago.

It isn't a big deal since I can manually save the attachment but I was wondering if anyone else had seen this behavior?

For what it's worth, I'd love to see this command added to the toolbar since I use it so often. It would make it less likely I select the wrong menu item from that cascading menu.

[Bodach]

[quote="voripteth"]This is somewhat sporatic behavior that I've observed so it could very well be pilot error. :shock:

I typically download binary articles with the "Download & Save Attachment" command. I'm prompted for a save directory and everything is terrific. Unfortunately I'm finding that ocassionally I have articles that are downloaded but not saved into files. Note that I haven't changed the "auto-save" function from the default but the original message was downloaded hours ago.

It isn't a big deal since I can manually save the attachment but I was wondering if anyone else had seen this behavior?

:idea: For what it's worth, I'd love to see this command added to the toolbar since I use it so often. It would make it less likely I select the wrong menu item from that cascading menu.[/quote]

A similar thing happens for me. The files are shown as 'downloaded' they actually get assembeled to the right directory, however, the icon never changes in the newspro window. It always stays as 'downloaded'. Alex?

[Tha*Lunat!k]

If you have the options in Properties > General set to delete bodies after saving attachments then you should never encounter a file that was successfully decoded to your hard drive yet retains its body.

As for autosave, I just use Ctrl-Alt-S if I want to activate the scan immediately.

If you use "Download&Save" and it doesn't ever auto-save it to your hard drive then something would most likely be wrong with the file or the encoding or something. If you issue "Download & Save" on an article that already has the body fully downloaded then NewsPro will save that file right away unless there's a problem. If you then issue "Save Attachments" it should give some sort of error on trying to save that particular file.

[voripteth]

I just had this happen again and the circumstances confirm in my mind that this is a bug. Here are the details.

I selected a bunch of messages to download and decode all at the same time and all of them decoded except for the last message. When I viewed the newsgroup it showed that the body had been downloaded but the attachment had not been saved.

The thing that I THINK happened with this particular article was that one of the servers that NewsPro was using to download ended up going past the 30 retries so it automatically switched to another server. Perhaps this switching or servers fooled NewsPro internally to think that there wasn't something to decode? Note that I didn't get any error messages in the task manager.

[alex]

Even if newspro failed to download a header and then the download resumed through 'retry failed articles' (automatic or manual, doesn't matter), it will still remember where to save the attachment after download, from this side there cannot be any trouble.

Can you reproduce that? What value do you have set in properties->general, autosave per? How long it took to mark the bunch for download? (I'm just asking, I could recheck the code, just I didn't experience that problem).

If the save wasn't successful from any reason (write error, disk full, the file with the same name exists and saving mode is not overwrite) - the bodies won't be deleted and attachment won't be saved if it is autosave, if it is not decoding error (something that cannot be decoded) you'll be able to save it manually, otherwise you won't.

[voripteth]

I've seen the problem several times lately, hence the creation of this thread in the first place. There aren't any specific steps that I've seen to trigger it other than marking messages as "Download & Save" and later finding the body downloaded but not decoded.

Manually performing a save works fine.

The AutoSave setting was left at 300 but I'm pretty sure more than 5 minutes elapsed since downloading the file in this case. In other cases it was hours that passed and decoding never ocurred. In the batch of files I had marked every one downloaded and saved fine except that last one.

There aren't any errors with saving that I know of. Plenty of free space, directory exists, file doesn't already exist. It should have worked but for some reason it didn't, hence my bug report. Perhaps there should be some error message could be added in the Task Manager to help discover the problem. Certainly NewsPro is trying to perform the decode task but stops for some reason. (I'm not seeing any error messages with these incidents.)

I'm probably seeing this problem less than 5% of the time but it has happened several times in the past week. If I can discover any other pattern to reproduce the problem I'll post it here.

[alex]

I also use the same setting, I thought maybe it is something different.

You just marked for download&save and then you didn't do anything with the headers? (although as I see here remarking for download doesn't change the save status).

Regarding the save directory, did you use a default directory (listed somewhere in the properties->newsgroups) or it was a new directory?

[jsdkr]

I also have seem something similar but very seldom does this happen , they seem to be anywhere in a download . not marked , not saved , just there and when I check pars missing from the save directory . Might be because of a restart . ( ie save database an restart ) happens so seldom that have I not looked for the cause .

[voripteth]

The bunch of files I marked for "Download & Save" were put in a new directory that I created. Everything else seemed to download to that location without a problem.

I didn't issue any additional commands to NewsPro at all until I noticed that a file was missing and I didn't have PARs. There wasn't any error message in the Task Manager so I went back to the header listings which showed the message in question had been downloaded but not saved. (Green lined icon) I manually told it to save and it did.

On second thought I did do something while the messages were downloading but I didn't think it was important. I did have the task manager open and was watching the parts download. I was clicking on the different progress bars to see why some seemed slower than others. That's how I knew that the file in question went to 31 retries and then changed servers.

Hope this helps!