Search function not working

Report · Apr 30, 2009

I've searched everywhere I can think of and can't find a solution to my problem. I'm hoping someone here can help me out.

I've recently added conditional build tags to my help file (at both the topic and content level) so that I can produce two versions of the same Webhelp file set. When modifying the outputs, I used conditional builds that didn't include "NOT" so that all topics with the conditional tag A show up in version A and all topics with conditional tag B show up in version B.

Everything seemed to work fine until I went to generate the files. One of the files (A) works fine, but the search functionality doesn't work on the second (B). I did a test and replaced the whdata, whgdata nd whxdata folders in version B with those of version A, and it was "fixed" - or at least the search functionality seemed to work. I then tried to regenerate the B version, and the search function doesn't work again. I also don't trust this as a solution, because I know there is some coding in those files that allows the search function to work for that particular version.

Has anyone else had this kind of problem? Any thoughts on why my search functionality is working only on the one file?

Thanks!

Report · Apr 30, 2009

Hi there

Can you better articulate exactly how you feel things aren't working? Prior to noticing Search wasn't working, did things seem to be okay with the B output?

How exactly do you know that Search isn't working? Is there a specific term that isn't displaying or what?

Cheers... Rick

Report · May 01, 2009

In the past I have never had a problem with the search functionality in output B - all searches resulted in at least some results. In the most recent published output for B, however, I only get "No Topics Found" no matter what word I search on. I have noticed the problem since adding the conditional build tags to the topics, but I can't determine why that would be causing the issue.

Report · May 06, 2009

Hi everyone,

I did a great deal of investigation since my first post, and I finally figured out what the problem was. I compared output files in the whxdata folder to the output files from when the search functionality had previously worked. I discovered the problem in the whfts.xml file. The last line of the "chunkinfo url" lines included the following:

When I replaced the � with the last character from the file that worked, "™" , and saved the file, the search functionality began working - I could search on any term again and not end up with "No Results Found".

Now I guess that � is hanging out somewhere in the topics I edited recently, so I'll have to do a search to get that fixed, but at least I know how to get the search to work in the short term!

I hope this helps someone out there who might be struggling with the same obscure issue.

Kari