DocFetcher Pro

DocFetcher Pro 1.17 is out. It’s been a while since the previous release (about 9 months), mostly due to DocFetcher Server, and since then a number of bugfixes and a few small feature additions have accumulated. In total, 8 bugs and crashes were fixed, some related to indexing, some related to the Search Scope pane, and some related to the preview pane.

As for features, the new release allows setting a file size limit on the files to be indexed, e.g., “don’t index files bigger than 500 MB”. The significance of this size limit is that it greatly reduces the risk of the application running out of memory while trying to index enormous files. The other new features are a new “Copy With Path” entry in the context menu of the preview pane, and an encoding override setting for HTML files in the Advanced Settings file.

For a detailed listing of the bugfixes and features, please see the changelog.

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DocFetcher Server 1.2 is out. This release fixes two indexing-related crashes and a major bug concerning index updates. The bug, as explained in the changelog: If a subfolder within an indexed folder was renamed, moved or removed, the files in that subfolder were not properly updated in the index, causing obsolete files to show up in the search results along the current ones. The obsolete files will disappear once you upgrade to the new release and update all your indexes.

It appears that recently, an unknown number of emails sent to the official support email address (support .. docfetcherpro.com) were lost. They were likely blocked on their way through Google’s servers for unknown reasons. If you sent an email to the support address and didn’t get a response, that’s why. Please resend your email to the address currently listed on the support page if your issue still persists. Apologies for the inconvenience!

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DocFetcher Server 1.1 is out. This releases is mostly a collection of usability improvements to round out some of the rough edges of the first release. Most items on the changelog are more or less significant, so in this release announcement there isn’t really much to do except copy and paste the entire changelog:

• The application could not be run on older Linux distributions due to a glibc compatibility issue. It now runs on Linux distributions with glibc 2.17 or newer.
• Among the indexing settings, there’s now a new setting for skipping content indexing for all files that are bigger than a certain maximum file size. The filenames of these files can still be indexed. With this new setting, it’s now possible to skip large files that may cause the application to run out of memory during indexing.
• In the Admin Area in the indexes table, there’s a new column “Visible”. By ticking and unticking the checkboxes in that column, you can control which indexes are transmitted to the clients, and which indexes are kept only on the server side. This is useful if you have some very large and rarely used indexes; keeping them on the server side when they’re not needed will make the web interface load faster.
• In the result table, you can now press the arrow-up and arrow-down keys to navigate to the previous or next result, with the contents of the preview pane updated accordingly. However, for this to work properly, you need to turn off “Automatically scroll to first match in preview pane” in the user preferences.
• For tablet users, there’s now a button above the result table for downloading the first selected result. Before, downloading results was only possible via the result table’s context menu, which is difficult to open on tablets.
• For technical reasons, the users that are counted towards the application’s client limit are identified by browser session rather than by IP address. Among other things, this means accessing the web interface from multiple browsers on the same computer counts as multiple clients rather than as a single client. For some users, this can be quite inconvenient. In addition, it was also inconvenient for a single user to switch between different computers. For these use cases, there’s now a workaround called “session stealing”, which means that when the client limit is reached, new users may take over existing sessions, thus kicking their previous owners out of the web interface. The intended use is for users to kick “themselves” out in order to more easily switch between browsers and/or computers. For instances of DocFetcher Server with a client limit greater than 1, session stealing is off by default and must be enabled in the Admin Area on the Access tab.
• It’s now possible to inject custom CSS and JavaScript into the web interface, on the server side, via the files misc/custom.css and misc/custom.js. Note that no support or HTML stability guarantees for such customizations is provided, as explained in the comments in the custom.css and custom.js files.

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