[Bioperl-l] Bio::DB::Query::GenBank checks

[Bernd Web]

Hi all,

I was using Bio::DB::Query::GenBank to obtain only IDs from Entrez and
found some issues and differences (bugs?) in behaviour wrt the pod.
Do these look familiar ?

Some example code:
my $query = Bio::DB::Query::GenBank->new
       (-query   =>'Lassa Virus[ORGN]',
        -reldate => '30',
        -db      => 'protein',
        -ids => [195052,2981014,11127914],
        -maxids => 30 );

$gb = new Bio::DB::GenBank(format=>'fasta');
my $seqio = $gb->get_Stream_by_query($query);
while (my $seq = $seqio->next_seq) {
       print $seq->desc,"\n"; }

The module states that if we provide -ids that:
       If you provide an array reference of IDs in -ids, the query will be
       ignored and the list of IDs will be used when the query is passed to a
       Bio::DB::GenBank object's get_Stream_by_query() method.

In the above case actually the query is passed ('Lassa Virus[ORGN]),
not the IDs. Also $query->query shows the original query. Am I doing
something wrong or is the pod not reflecting current behaviour of this
module?

I was also surprised that if internet is down no warning is thrown for
$query->query or $query->count at all. Only the get_Stream_by_query
above will warn us if the site is unreachable (500 Internal Server
Error).

$query->ids or $query->count will not throw a warning and
@ids=$query->ids will just be an empty array. (I realize $query->count
is not initialized, so I am using this now to check for succes, but a
warning from WebDBSeqI would me more approprotiate I think).

Last, the example from the pod is not working, but no warnings are raised:
          # initialize the list yourself
          my $query =
Bio::DB::Query::GenBank->new(-ids=>[195052,2981014,11127914]);

$query->count returns zero w/o any warning. Of course this query did
not specify a DB. Only if we specify -db=>'nucleotide' $query->count
is 3.
However, why not any warning if we set -db->'protein' or if we did not set this?

On the NCBI website searching Protein DB returns for 19505:
      See Details. No items found.
      The following term(s) refer to a different DB:195052

But this is not reflected via Bio::DB::Query::GenBank.

Can I check for this situation in the code apart from checking on
$query->count == 0 ? Or would it indeed be better to check for these
situations in the module?

Regards,
Bernd