Search not displaying results in IE11 if built from RH2017

Question

My team are having a problem that some RH2015 projects that behaved perfectly in IE11 are now causing a problem if rebuilt in RH2017. The search panel in the WebHelp no longer displays results or any evidence of performing a search. The search works when viewed in Chrome and will also work in IE11 if you press F12 and select compatibility mode 10. Building out to HTML5 format, as a test, also results in a working help in IE11. So, the issue seems to be specifically with the WebHelp format.

The problem seemed similar to a search problem affecting RH11 that was covered on this forum and required a patch to the whutils.js and whver.js files. Indeed, we quickly found that we can resolve the problem by taking the whutils.js produced by RH2015 and dropping it into the RH2017 WebHelp output folder to overwrite the generated file. The help then appears to behave perfectly on IE11 (and other browsers).

A comparison of the whutils.js files from both RoboHelp versions shows that they are not identical and that additional code has been added in 2017. The help files received minimal editing before being rebuilt as WebHelp and no 2017-specific features were added, so this may be why we are getting away with using the 2015 file. However, as I don't know what the new code is doing, I'm uncomfortable about using the RH2015 file as a fix.

Can anyone on the forum or from the Adobe team tell me if this problem is already known or if there is a patch for the file: we did search on the forum and bug report site but saw nothing obvious? The machine on which we performed the build was new and had a clean install of Technical Communications Suite 2017, and we have also confirmed it is fully up-to-date with software updates.

Am I right in assuming that, when building WebHelp, RoboHelp fetches the whutils.js file from <RHnstallFolder>\RoboHTML\WebHelp5Ext\template_stock and that any permanent patch would need to be applied in that folder?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer,

Charles Addison

ChickAD · Accepted Answer

I have tested your output and it is working fine with IE11 on my server. I have emailed you a link so that you can see it for yourself.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

Thanks Peter for your help and, as a result of you demonstrating it worked on your site, we think we have resolved the problem and explained the weird behaviour we were getting.

Firstly, there is not a RoboHelp 2017 problem: the problem was caused by our IT department who unknown to us had pushed out a group wide IE11 setting that affected all intranet users.Display intranet sites in Compatibility view (in Tools) was switched on by default. This would not have been a problem if they had not also decided, for some strange reason, to set the default to IE5!!! To be honest, I'm surprised our help was the onlything that broke.

Thank you for supporting Erika while I was off ill. I'll mark this question as answered.

Jeff_Coatsworth · Answer

Yup, that's exactly where the generate process fetches it's source files - can you do a compare of the RH2015 & RH2017 versions and show the differences? That may give gurus like Willam a lead on what's happening...

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