JavaScript full-text search limitations

[Roman Turcanu]

For various reasons, my department is constrained to using JavaScript search in Webhelp, and to using Help&Manual version 6.5.5, build 3020. Could you please confirm the following:

1) With JavaScript search, are the words generated in zoom_index.js file limited to 34 characters?
2) If yes, is there any way to influence this from Help&Manual, apart from using and configuring the standalone version of Zoom Indexer?

With respect to the background of these questions, my problem is that text like this:

ConvertingToSomething.setCloseObjectsAfterRun();

becomes unsearchable with JavaScript if you search the phrase "setCloseObjectsAfterRun". The cause apparently is that longer strings (like the one above) are chopped to 34 characters in the zoom_index.js file:

Code: Select all

   "convertingtosomething.setcloseobje 470 18 20",

I've also tried to customize search not to treat dots as "Word-joining characters", here are my settings:

1.png

But this does not seem to have any effect -- text is still chopped in the zoom_index.js file, and I also noticed this line remained unchanged in settings.js:

Code: Select all

var WordJoinChars = ".-_'";

Thank you for any help!

[Tim Green]

That is correct, there is an absolute limit on the length of words that can be searched. Here is the information from the programmers at Zoom on this:

Yes, there is a maximum word length of 35 characters (34 in some cases). This is a hard coded technical limitation (documented in section 8.5 of the Users Guide) for simplicity sake. This is an effort to come to a good compromise with memory requirement and practical needs.

There is no switch to override this. It would require a custom build to change this value.

In the past, for technical documentations, we’ve found that most of the problems were due to extended class names e.g.

javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalComboBoxEditor.UIResource

In these cases, we found that it can be addressed by disabling Dots as word joining characters (then an example like the above is indexed as 6 words).