Web help: Search function does not work

Please post all questions relating to Help & Manual 6 here!

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

Post Reply
raghunomix
Posts: 16
Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2015 11:53 pm

Web help: Search function does not work

Unread post by raghunomix »

When I enter a search keyword into Quick Search textbox and Enter or click Search icon, web help always shows below message and no search result displays.

"Enter one or more keywords to search ('*' and '?' wildcards are supported):";

Is this a bug. Is there any fix. Do i need to report this to Help & Manual support?

Please advice.


Thanks,
Raghu
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: Web help: Search function does not work

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Raghu,

It looks as though either your skin is corrupted or damaged or something failed when you published to WebHelp and the search index was not generated correctly.

First check the compiler report after publishing to see if you can see any error messages for the search index. Then try publishing with a fresh, unedited copy of the skin you are using.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
dreesor
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Jul 20, 2010 9:34 pm
Location: Edmonton, Canada

Re: Web help: Search function does not work

Unread post by dreesor »

Hi

I have a similar situation as the previous post: search only works on a few pages in the published project.

Using: Help and Manual 6.5.2 Build 3002
Publishing to Amazon s.3 Bucket and using Firefox.
Published with a custom skin (Dark Powers) with minor modifications, and as well a non-customized skin.

I used a MS Word RFT document and imported it into Help and Manual. 95% of the topics came from the RFT, but a few were "hand made" as I build out the remainder of the TOC. Search will yield results from my "hand made" pages such as "Welcome," and "Bibliography" but not the 300+ other pages. Please see the attached screenshot of the compiler messages. More than 300 pages were not indexed.

Example Topic IDs: are as Follows:
RFT: _Toc463535576, _Toc463535513 etc.
Hand Made Pages: Bibliography, Welcome

Three questions:
How is this repaired?
How can it be avoided for future RFT imports?
Will this also affect how toggle images behave? (They are not currently working on the pages that were not indexed.

As always, thanks in advance for the support.

Dale
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: Web help: Search function does not work

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Dreesor,

Looking at your compiler report the problem is clear: only 7 topic files are being indexed for search. My guess is that you imported the topics from a Word file, which contains topic IDs that start with an underscore. If you generate a report with the Report Tool in the Project tab and check all the IDs you will most likely see that a lot of them start with the underscore character (_). In WebHelp topics whose IDs begin with an underscore are automatically excluded from the search.

In Help+Manual 7 this is corrected automatically when you import from Word, but in Help+Manual 6 I am afraid that you will have to edit each topic ID individually to remove the underscores (in the Topic Options tab below the main editor window). All links to the topic within the project will be automatically corrected when you do this.

You should also update your copy of HM6 to the final version, which is 6.5.6 Build 3027. You can download the installer here (just install on top of your current version to update):

http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html#oldver
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Post Reply