Home page search stopped working

Interesting and thanks for posting that. I will bring it to Adobe's attention.

Did you try changing any of the Search settings in the preset, particularly sub-string search?

Trial accomplished - and the search function-or-failure seems to be related to the count of matches for the specific key string!

What we did and why we think that's it:

First of all. we were ruling out a bug in the search function in general by changing the skin and output preset, producing output out of a fresh project containing just a minimum amount of content, and running a project from the "RoboHelp reimagined" template. Those attempts all worked out fine, presenting a fully functional search.

Then we cut our current company project (>120 active topics with all kinds of content) into smaller pieces to find the gremlin that eats our searches, as Peter Grainge put it. In addition, we unselected all higher search functions. That worked out fine, too: search works okay if running through a smaller portion of content. 

Next step was to add more of the portions, generate output and see which amount of content crashes the search. 

Unluckily, it's obviously not the amount of content but the matches for the search string what breaks the search function while executing the search.

E.g., we searched for "Windows" and "Linux" in our programming-related content. For "Windows", the whole content (not just the output topics) contains 20 matches according to the RoboHelp search in code, with 18 of them appearing in our current output set. The search execution was somewhat slow but working.

"Linux" has 61 matches, and the search execution breaks while searching for that string in the output via the JavaScript function. Some other slightly generic text strings resulting in about 100 matches don't work while searches for rare matches do. The threshold seems to be near 25-30 matches despite what the output preset settings for "Number of results on a page" are. Raising this number makes no difference in the outcome, and keeping it at the default "20" doesn't help.

Another phenomenon we found is that strings only present in our start topic (which is a usual topic, not the tile homepage) can't be found at all. Is it excluded from the search? And if this is the case - why should that be a good idea? In some lengthy topics the full-text search is a nice feature for users to jump to the section they are interested in, even if the key string doesn't show in a headline in the right panel.

Right now, we decided to ignore these bugs and hope users will be clever enough to changes the search string to be more specific. I'll set up a bug in the Adobe tracker, hoping the great guys at the Adobe TCS team will fix this in Update 12. 

Bug report for this: https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/RH-6709

@g_br Hopefully when you have tracked down the gremlin, it will be something you can share. Was it suggested anywhere here that you try deleting what is in the .rh folder from a copy of the project?

j3p0 Please share how you resolved it. 

@g-br Just in case you hadn't spotted it, Surbhi is an Adobe employee and you would be sending it direct to her.

Just as a thought, if you copied the project and then trashed all the content except a few topics, you could see if it still had the same problem and send that?

Hi,

I tried upgrading an update 9 and update 10 project to Update 11 having frameless Orange skin. When I am genertaing frameless output from Update 11, search is working on homepage. Are there any specific steps to reproduce this issue?

Please share a sample project with us where this issue is happening (sumahesh@adobe.com).

Which browser are you viewing your output in? I tried with Chrome Verson 80.0.3987.122.

Thanks and Regards,
Surbhi Maheshwari

But what do you mean by "coming to that bridge"? We already crossed it weeks ago, having a project consisting of about 100 topics online for customers worldwide.

I simply meant if whatever you or I can come up with doesn't work.

If the search function suddenly breaks after another update, there must be a reason. And a smarter workaround than "rebuild your project from scratch".

Yes there has to be a reason but we need to determine whether it is down to RoboHelp or something that wasn't right in the project but pre Update 10 wasn't an issue. Do not read that as saying your project is the problem, simply we need to eliminate that.

You might say: "Why did you update your RoboHelp installation before testing all functions?". There were some bugs and bad behaviour in the Update 10 output, like the cluttered indentation in the right panel, so we didn't hesitate to repair those flaws as soon as possible.

No I wouldn't say that as you shouldn't be expected to. When you say "we" do you mean you or Adobe? I couldn't say that as I am not Adobe.

And since there's no easy way to downgrade to 14.0.10 again, where the search function worked properly with our data, we just have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea

You can downgrade with some care. Read on.

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First things first. Have you tried generating from the supplied RoboHelp Reimagined sampe project to see if that has the same issue? Similarly have you tried creating a new project with just a couple of topics to see if that has the same issue?

If they do not, then that rather points to something in your project that needs looking into. Answer those questions first please and we can take it from there. 

As to going back to Update 10, after you have tried the above with Update 11 installed, create a copy of your project. I have no way of knowing what the upgrade has done so we need to be able to be able to stick with Update 11 if downgrading has its own issue.

Then uninstall RoboHelp and follow this link. There you can download any of the Updates and install them.

I'll explain more later but you can download Update 10. Search something like RoboHelp Downloads. I can provide proper link later. 

If it works in a new project and we can rule out the skin somehow, a rebuild might not be as difficult as you think in 2019. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

If it is necessary to build a current project completely new from scratch, includiing all skin adjustments, to make the search work again, that would be a disaster for us.