Search returning information from other chm files

This forum is for all Flare issues related to the Microsoft HTML Help target.
This target produces "CHM" files in the output.
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jonathanwells
Propeller Head
Posts: 38
Joined: Fri Sep 24, 2010 1:54 am

Search returning information from other chm files

Post by jonathanwells »

Hi. We have about 8 different products. For this example lets take two and call them 'Product A' and 'Product B'.

'Product A' has a chm file named 'ProdA.chm', 'Product B's is called 'ProdB.chm'. The .chm files are all installed to the same folder in Program Files (x86).

A client who has both products installed has discovered that when they do a search and type in something like 'New Features' the search is returning all items containing the wording 'New Features' for both products.

I have recently upgraded from Flare 7 to 9.12 and looking back at the older .chm files prepared in 7 the search only seems to return 'New Features' items for 'Product A' if you search from 'Product A'.

I am wondering if there is some new functionality that enables this kind of cross .chm file searching but I have checked the Skin and Target (HTML output) and can find nothing.

The thing that really confuses me is we have one product, 'Product C', where the search only returns 'New Features' for this product only. This is the result we want to have and I can't for the life of me see why this one works as we want it to, but the others don't.

Is there any way we can stop the seacrh returning information from other .chm files that are stored in the same common area, but are labelled separately?

Thanks Jonathan.
wclass
Propellus Maximus
Posts: 1238
Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2006 5:56 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Search returning information from other chm files

Post by wclass »

Are these help files built from the same Flare project? If yes, it could be an issue with how your condition tags are set.
Margaret Hassall - Melbourne
jonathanwells
Propeller Head
Posts: 38
Joined: Fri Sep 24, 2010 1:54 am

Re: Search returning information from other chm files

Post by jonathanwells »

Thanks Margaret but no these are completely different projects having uniquely named Flare project files. The only similarity is where they are stored ie they are all installed to the same common folder. If I delete all the other .chm files from this folder and do a search from the remaining .chm file it correctly just returns items from that .chm file. If I then put back the other .chm files in the same folder and do the search again it returns items from the other .chm files as well which is not what we need.

This all seems to have happened since upgrading to 9 and as I said previously there is one project where this doesn't happen which is even more weird. I have checked the target and skin for all the projects but the settings seem to be the same so I don't understand whay the behaviour differs. There must be a setting somewhere which controls whether the search reaches out to other .chm files, or just returns results from the .chm file searched upon.

Thanks.
jonathanwells
Propeller Head
Posts: 38
Joined: Fri Sep 24, 2010 1:54 am

Re: Search returning information from other chm files

Post by jonathanwells »

For the benefit of anyone viewing I have established that this is a bug in Flare 9. This is the Madcap response:

"While I'm not sure why this setting was changed, currently there is not a workaround regarding the search results if they are on the same directory. What is basically happening is there is a relative link between the CHM files (inserted into topics from one CHM to another). When that happens, Flare is including the merged CHM in the .hhp file which links between the two and causes the search issue. This issue only occurs if they are on the same directory.

I have submitted a bug report to the developers regarding this issue. In the future, please reference this report with the number [88025]. If a fix is released for this issue, we'll send you an e-mail mentioning this bug report number."


I'm really hoping that this will be fixed.
techwriter31
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Posts: 551
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:50 am

Re: Search returning information from other chm files

Post by techwriter31 »

We've noticed the same behavior, and thought it a bit odd, but just assumed it was a side effect of linking between two CHM files in the same directory. Good to know it's a bug!
Kellie
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