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ddng911
Participating Frequently
July 21, 2011
Question

RH Search Problem

  • July 21, 2011
  • 4 replies
  • 443 views

Hello,

I joined this forum because of issues with RH search I've been hacking away at for the past two days.

There are mainly two features I'm trying to add to Robohelp. I'm running a Merged WebHelp (in RH 9) with one project a child of another. Both the parent project and child has their topics, toc, etc. They were two different project where I made one a subproejct of another.

One of the features I am trying to add is to have the search results displays results from the child project first before the parent (kind of contradictory to give the child priority but it has to do with the existing framework).  As it is, the search results jumble topics from child and parent together. I essetnially want the child topcis to appear first.

Another feature I am trying to add is to open a second frame on the side of certain topics. The frame will contain the search results from the child project with the query being the topic. I can't create a link to have a search frame independent. I also can't seem to script up a code to pass in parameters for the search (the js files for search are just enormous).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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    4 replies

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 21, 2011

    As it is, the search results jumble topics from child and parent together.

    Indeed it does, that is the whole point of merged help, making it look like one output to the end user. See Merged Help on my site as i think that will help will you generally.

    I don't recommend having links between the parent and a child or any child to the parent. Child to child links are fine. Explained on my site.

    I'm struggling to visualise what you describe in your final paragraph. Can you mock up something? I'm inclined to the view that you are not going to get RoboHelp's own search to do what you want. Maybe you would be better of not using it and building in ZoomSearch instead. Also described on my site.

    I'm about to kill the PC for today as it's late where I am. Post back any follow up questions when you have read what is on my site. I'll look in the morning.

    See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

    @petergrainge

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    ddng911Author
    Participating Frequently
    July 21, 2011

    Hello,

    Thanks for the quick reply. I've gone through some of your pages but I couldn't the info I needed. I can't use ZoomSearch because I am to do this project at no cost beyond the existing framework (and the free version is doesn't support large information).

    For my first point, the reason I had merged the two projects into one is because I had wanted Project A's search to be able to delve through the topics of both projects (minus the topics marked exclude from search). Project B's search only has access to its own files. Another addition is that in Proejct A's results, Project B's topics need to appear above Project A (B's topics should rank higher than A's per se). The best way I could combine the topics was to merge.

    If there was a way for me to achieve the description above without merging I'd appreciate it.

    For the last part I confusingly mentioned, Zoom search seems to be a tool I could customize for what I want but I don't have authorization to get it. What I need is this:

    Certain topics in Project A are linked (and connected) to topics in Project B. Whenever a user accesses a topic in A , I want the user to see a list of all topics in B that have links to the A topic (say on a frame to the right). The list needs to look similar to how search display its results. I had tried to place an automated search result frame of B (using the topic A's title as the query) next to the topic in A but to no avail. Worst comes to worst, I can manually push in a frame with a manually created list of all topics in B that reference it.

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 22, 2011

    So you have spent $### on RoboHelp but cannot spend $99 on ZoomSearch! However, displaying a list of topics that are linked to the current topic is not what search does and I have not seen anything that will automate that.

    Could you not use either See Also or Related Topics to create something that is close to what you want? See Snippet 107 on my site.

    You have RoboHelp 9 and that introduced Dynamic User Centric Content - DUCC. Using that your users can access different versions of the help. Maybe you could vary your requirements to make that useful. That is described in the RoboHelp Tour on my site and is set up in the sample projects that ship with RoboHelp 9. Click Open on the RoboHelp Starter page and then click Samples in the ribbon on the left.

    See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

    @petergrainge

    Use the menu (bottom right) to mark the Best Answer or Highlight particularly useful replies. Found the answer elsewhere? Share it here.
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