'Unhinged' search tab from webhelp frame but...

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vancouver-tech-writer
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Joined: Thu May 21, 2009 7:25 pm
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

'Unhinged' search tab from webhelp frame but...

Unread post by vancouver-tech-writer »

Hello, I upload my published webhelp to our client website. I want users to be able to search for help topics without opening help. In experimenting, I have placed the HTML for the Search tab in an iFrame on a web page:

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<iframe height="400" src="/treasuryportal/portals/0/help/help_ftsearch.html" frameborder="0" width="200"></iframe>
It works perfectly fine: you can enter a Search term and search results display, which you can click, which open within the webhelp frameset in another page. However, when you first navigate to the page where I've done this, the Search box shows the text 'undefined'... Refer to screenshot.
a.png
Do you know why? It would look better if the Search box was blank (as it is when you view Search 'properly' within webhelp. Ideally, I'd like the web site's Search box to index help topics but it only indexes content for web pages created by the CMS, not uploaded webhelp pages. Oh well. If you can help me the above, I'll live with it.

Thanks!
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Steve
Technical Writer
Vancouver, BC, Canada
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Tim Green
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Re: 'Unhinged' search tab from webhelp frame but...

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Steve,

Basically, you're getting this because you've relocated an integrated component without removing its connections to its parent or adapting the code to work in a separate page on its own. The search page expects to be integrated in the WebHelp user interface, and if it's not then a number of things it is looking for will not be available. The version you have chosen to move out clearly has some script that trying to populate the search box with some text from a variable, and since the variable can't be loaded in the new location you're getting "undefined".

You need to do a fair amount of editing, recoding and CSS modification to make something like this work correctly. If you're familiar with JavaScript and CSS you can use a tool like the Firefox Web Developer Add-On to view the HTML source code that is being generated when you actually view the page, and this is necessary to understand what is going on because it's quite different from the code you will see when you look at the static file.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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