Truncated links in search results.

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droberts
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Apr 28, 2015 1:56 pm

Truncated links in search results.

Unread post by droberts »

Hi,

I'm getting a weird issue that I've not experienced before when uploading help files. As the attached images show, search results appear but sometimes without the topic or any text listed. Sometimes the topic is listed, but when you click on the topic, you cannot reach the page. The page link is truncated in the URL. Occasionally, the link shows up as the text of the document rather than the title of the section.

What is odd about this feature is it doesn't seem to occur when I manually upload the HTML file for the help to any of our servers. I've narrowed down when it is breaking to either when I use SourceTree to upload our files, or use Puppet to merge the files. In all other cases, I can simply manually upload the help files to a server, and everything operates as it should.

What kind of file can I look at that controls the search function as displayed here? What might be the cause of the break? If I can narrow down where the problem might be occurring, I might be able to better diagnose and fix the issue.
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Tim Green
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Re: Truncated links in search results.

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi "D",

It looks as though your uploading and/or your merging program is making damaging changes to the files. You should definitely never ever make any changes to the WebHelp files after they have been generated, so any kind of merging would be pretty much guaranteed to make a mess. Among other things, the search index is generated from the files in the output folder, and if you then change those files in any way the index entries will point to some location in the depths of Mordor... 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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droberts
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Apr 28, 2015 1:56 pm

Re: Truncated links in search results.

Unread post by droberts »

Generally, the only changes I'm aware of that we make to these files after generating them in WebHelp is to add a little bit of code at the front of the Index file. This has been standard for a while, and has never broken anything before. I, too, believe it has something to do with the merge, but haven't isolated it yet. Certainly not making any changes to any other files from the HTML folder we produce. That nothing is wrong with the files unless I try to merge it (a process I've done for over a year now with no issues) tells me it isn't H&M's issue.

Gonna need a white wizard to fix this one. :)
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