Merged Responsive HTML5 - German Help Not Searching Properly on webserver (RH 2017)

[Jared Hess]

Hello RoboHelpers,

Let me state/restate at the outset that I do not like how Adobe does their Search in responsive HTML5 in RH 2017! Frail, finicky, and fraught with difficulty are some words/phrases that come to mind. It almost makes me want to go back to .chm output. At least the searching worked well there (*Sigh*). Okay, venting is hopefully done. Onto my issue...

I have the latest RH 2017. I'm building a large merged responsive HTML5 output. We localize our English helps into 16 supported languages.

For some reason, when we search on our webserver in our localized German, it doesn't give proper search results. For some words, it just spins forever. For other terms, it says it can't find search results. But the words are clearly in the Help, because we can browse to .htm pages with those terms. And yet for other terms, it does return at least some results. I don't get it.

And the odd thing is that when I view the EXACT same set of files locally on my computer's file explorer, using Windows 10, and I search across the Help locally there, I do get the expected search results... So, what gives? It's the exact same set of files as best I can tell (I've checked with Beyond Compare, and I don't get any differences).

If the files are exactly identical, shouldn't the search behave in an identical way? Does anyone have any bright ideas about what could be causing the search to not work online?

[Amebr]

Do you get a message saying "Searching 0%" or something like that?

If so, perhaps a bug I reported might help. The fix is for RH2019 Classic, but perhaps it can also apply to RH2017, as I also experienced the problem in RH11.

https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/RH-7437

A comment towards the end lists a download link for multiscreen and responsive files. You can compare the RH2019 files to the ones in RH2017 to check how different they are.

If the link isn't working it was a one line fix from if ( a_strRecord == "" ) to if  ( !a_strRecord ). I can give approximate line number and some of the code around it, if the link doesn't work or if the RH2017 files are significantly different to the RH2019 Classic ones.

[Jared Hess · Accepted solution]

Good morning all. The strange thing is that this morning, without me doing a blessed thing, the search is now working! So, we must surmise that in some cases, after we push a large merged help system to a webserver, it seems to just need time to "settle" before the search will kick in and begin to work... I spent hours yesterday trying to figure this out when apparently I guess all I needed was some patience: "Patience young padawan..."

What all this really means in technical terms with what's happening on the back end of the server, I have no clue. (It's a Microsoft Azure server.) But however it happened, I'm glad it's finally working! (Another language I had built was also doing the same thing yesterday, and it also is now working this morning.)

@Amebr  - Thank you for responding. I don't know if what I was seeing is the same thing that your bug is dealing with. Maybe it's related. In my case, for some terms it would just spin and spin and never do anything. In others, it would just say something like "No results found". I wonder if maybe downloading those newer classic RH 2019 files that you mentioned on that bug link would improve things in my RH 2017. I know they're diff versions, but I think they're essentially the same technology under the hood.

[Amebr · Accepted solution]

Yes, the problem was intermittent here as well. It took me ages before I got a report while the problem was still happening for a user so I could get some debug information from them - I couldn't reproduce on my end.

I wouldn't just paste the entire file across unless they are very similar (I mean you could, with appropriate backups, if you wanted 🙂  ) Beyond Compare could tell you for certain how different they are.

I think the one line change they provided would be worth applying if you can find the same line in your file - I'm pretty certain that line existed in my RH11 project when I first reported it. The line went from  "if this value is empty" to "if this value doesn't exist" which I believe is pretty significant programmatically. (Note, I'm not a programmer, so I might have some of the specifics wrong, but it's a close approximation 😛 )

[Jared Hess]

Thanks @Amebr 

This was the same problem I was having, I think. I'm ended up getting the same issue in our Swedish version of our Help yesterday. It worked fine locally but never finished searching on the webserver. When I checked the console in my browser as it's hung, I saw this "Uncaught TypeError: a_strRecord is null" message:

And it reminded me of your post earlier on this thread. I then installed the updated script from bug RH-7437 and rebuilt all the helps (child and parent) for Swedish, and this morning it appears to be fixed. I did do a Beyond Compare first and saw that it only differed in that one line where they changed if ( a_strRecord == "" ) to if  ( !a_strRecord ).

[Amebr]

Hopefully it works for you. I haven't had any further reports of the issue, although it was very random when it occurred here. If it happens again, do log a bug with Adobe and post back here with the number and I'll vote on it. 🙂