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WriterJeanne
Known Participant
November 13, 2016
Question

Bookmark links do not work in responsive in mobile browsers

  • November 13, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1730 views

Hi,

I have created a project that contains bookmark links to locations both within the same topic and to locations in a different topic. When I generate the project in Responsive layout, the links do not work in mobile browsers (Safari, Chrome). They work fine on desktop.

First, or links within the same topic, pressing on the links in the mobile browser shows that some additional text is added to the link in the form: ?random=1b1falkfh... This text is included after the ".htm" of the link parent topic and before the "#" of the bookmark.

For example, a link to the bookmark "step_c" shows:

  http://www.mysite.com/manual/topic_2.htm?random=1b1fbn7fl_0egkh2j80#step_c

Second, links to a different topic simply go to the top of that topic, not to the bookmark. These links do not appear to be corrupted, they just don't function properly.

I generated this same project as Webhelp and these links all work properly in mobile browsers. It seems as though the Responsive layout is corrupting the bookmark links.

Please advise on fix. I am using RH 2015 rel. 3.

Jeanne Daniele

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1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 14, 2016

Try updating & regenerating again – there’s a new 4th patch out there now

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WriterJeanneAuthor
Known Participant
November 14, 2016

Thanks Jeff.

I'm not sure that the 4.1 patch will help this situation - the project does not have any conditional text and I was testing on iOS 9 with Safari 9 and latest Chrome. I searched the Adobe bugbase for "bookmarks" and found nothing.

I am hesitant to update RH - I had a bad experience with 4.0 (won't hide TOC/Index/Glos/Filt) and had to roll back to 3, which took a while. I am now, as I was then, under aggressive deadline and can't afford that kind of experience.

Mulling my options on this. I have 3 weeks, so I will monitor for problems in 4.1 and update as a last step.

Jeanne

W
WriterJeanneAuthor
Known Participant
November 15, 2016

The 4.1 patch seems to work for me (at least on iOS). I've created a sample output with a TOC link and a hyperlink here: Travel the Whirls Knowledge Base

The bookmark in the TOC is the item called 'book'. The link is on the page 'Corporate Locations'.

Let me know whether this works on your end as well. If it does, the 41 patch may be the way to go.

The 4.1 does hide the TOC/Index/Glos/Filter, so that should not block the update.


Hi William,

Thanks for taking the time to create this sample. Here is what I found using an iPad (landscape layout) with iOS 9 in both Safari and Chrome:

The "book" link in the TOC as well as the link "Link to bookmark" in the topic Corporate Locations work initially but stopped working after I began navigating randomly .

I can reproduce the failure using the following steps:

  1. In the TOC, navigate to the topic Software Developer Staff Information > Context Sensitive Help > Context-sensitive help for mobile apps.
  2. Scroll to bottom of the topic.
  3. In TOC, navigate back up to top level and click "book" link.

Result: The target page does not load fully, and shows top of page, not bookmark location. If you press the browser "reload" button, the page then appears at the correct location.

More testing revealed that:

  • Scrolling in step 2 seems critical, and this will happen with other topics in this project that are long enough to scroll. Short topics don't exhibit this. However, the long topics also have other attributes that may be causing this (images, glossary terms etc.)
  • This happens only in tablet-portrait layout.
  • All works fine on desktop with browser window sized to present same layout.
  • The "random" text that is added to bookmark links within the same topic (mentioned in  my initial post) apparently does not interfere. (I see it in this project too, and those links work.)

A more typical situation would involve having a link within a long page that points to a bookmark on another page, so a better test would be to add a link to the test bookmark towards the bottom of one of the long topics (i.e. "Context-sensitive help for mobile apps").

Thanks,

Jeanne

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