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K
Krischu
Inspiring
April 3, 2018
Question

cannot find any search results in CHM - strange behaviour

  • April 3, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 2234 views

I have a central CHM of a merged Robohelp HTML Help project in which I cannot find any search hits.

In a different one built at another date I can find results. (this is independent on the subprojects chms being there or not. Alone that central CHM exposes the strange behaviour)

The funny thing: a colleague cannot find search results in the same CHM (in which I can find results). OTOH, when I try the CHM where he can find results

I don't find any. When I try the same on another machine, same picture with me.

How can this be?

--

Christoph

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1 reply

K
KrischuAuthor
Inspiring
April 4, 2018

I can add a few datapoints:

I have two trees in which I can compile the CHMs, both are SVN-based.

I generated a new CHM and put it on a network drive for being able to share  resp. test it from different systems (Windows7 Windows 10)

The stress doesn't ly on network here. I believe it is noc a network issue. The effect also occurs when the files are copied to the local machine.

I was able to invohe the CHM (double click) on the icon and could open a search giving me 52 resuts.
Doing the same from another Windows machine , I can start a search and get 197 results . Same CHM

Now I went to a third machine, Windows 10 (VM under MacOS Parallels), in same network , click on the chm, no search results found

So what is going on here?

From my understanding the search is done via indexing, an index is generated.

Does it have to be the named index of the project (in the SSL configuration view) or does it have to be the "default index"?

I believe it must have to do something with the index.

Could it be any cache effects? Are CHMs chached somewhere on the respective OS that invoke the CHM. I'm clueless for the moment.

--

Christoph

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 4, 2018

CHMs are not my strong suit but a few points until those who know more come online.

  1. CHMs are not supposed to be run from a network, unless you apply certain registry changes. See CHM Files Not Working on Network
  2. The search terms are stored in a number of files based on the topics in the project. The index is a quite separate thing.and does not affect the search.
  3. Which index you select affects what is seen in the Index tab of the output and does not affect the search.

On my site there are pages on Merged Help with a section on CHMs. Maybe something there will help

I can't think why you would get different results if you are looking at exactly the same files and they are out of version control. Hopefully someone with more CHM knowledge can help you.

See www.grainge.org for free RoboHelp and Authoring information.

@petergrainge

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K
KrischuAuthor
Inspiring
April 5, 2018

Further investigating the behaviour of the CHM I found something really puzzling:

The machine on which I compile the CHMs has a directory tree

C:\Help\Projects\etc etc      (working copy)

On the machine I'm testing, there is the same tree

C:\Help\Projects\etc etc    (somewhat older version)

(more or less by accident)

Now when I copied the new CHMs to the test machine I was wondering why I got old images in the CHM (the names were the same but they have been updated by new contents). Huh? Clicking the page on the development machine give the new images, clicking on the test machines I see the old ones?

Now when I right click on one of the images (that should have new contents but appear to have old contents) I'm getting:

Address: mk: @MSITStore:C:\Help\Projects\etc etc

since this path appear to be there on my target machine (test machine), the old image contents seems to be refered.

Why is that referred outside the CHM at all?

I would expect the CHMs to be self contained without any reference to the outside.

BTW, do the Merge CHM-Files specified in the MERGE FILES section of the .hhp file have to be specified with absolute paths?
We did it recently as it seemed these paths were modified by some magic all the time. In the .XPJ merge section all files are without any prefix.

When doing a next test, I deleted the .cpd and started over the create the merged CHM newly. I now get the correct icons contents, but the search function doesn't reveal any results.

Really puzzling.

--

Christoph

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