Search Displays Blank Titles That Open XML

[jblackwood]

When I search in my WebHelp output, I found an instance where I get several results that have blank titles. When I open any of these topics, I get XML, but it doesn't appear to be an actual topic. It's the weirdest thing!! Has anybody seen this? Any ideas what the problem may be?

Thanks!
Jeff

[i-tietz]

did you import those topics?

[jblackwood]

I don't know what topics they are supposed to be to know whether or not they were imported.

[i-tietz]

We imported our old RoboHelp projects and the files had to be converted by opening them in the XML editor. Before that it wasn't the right XHTML code ... maybe your problem is something just like that.

[twmarcb]

I have the same exact issue and it occurs when a user enters a long string... our QA hit it with "db is not pre-sized appropriately" in the "Search ALL Help" field. Our help is not imported (all from scratch) and I've tested it with existing Help we have written over the past year and get the same results (at the bottom of the returned results).

[twmarcb]

further testing confirms that anything with "is not" inside of text like "test test is not test test" will produce the problem. It looks like it is searching the index XML and finding "is not" and spitting that xml out multiple times.

You can see for yourself at http://www.idera.com/help/sqldoctor/1-1/
Click Search All Help and enter:
test test is not test test

The output text starts with the following:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

−
<index>
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->
−
<stem n="get">
−
<phr n="Get">
<ent r="1000" t="0" w="1"/>
<ent r="102" t="0" w="4"/>
<ent r="6" t="0" w="61"/>
<ent r="1000" t="17" w="1"/>
<ent r="102" t="17" w="6"/>
</phr>
−
<phr n="get">
<ent r="65" t="14" w="119"/>
<ent r="65" t="19" w="84"/>
<ent r="3" t="25" w="43"/>
</phr>

[twmarcb]

I believe I have found the problem and what to do to fix this, although I'm not sure how this will affect very large projects where the solution may not be desirable.

1. Open your target file in Flare (MyWebHelp(Primary).
2. Select the Performance tab.
3. Un-check "Chunk Large Search Database Files".
4. Run your build.

The chunk size affects the speed in which your index, TOC and search database is generated. For example, 1000 bytes means that the data file size will be sent in 1000 byte blocks. Using Chunking the right way can improve performance depending on the connection speed users have to your help.

Through my testing I found that larger "chunk" sizes increase the number of blank "XML" results I received. Doubling the default to 60000 increased the number of blank "XML" pages from 40 to ~250, while decreasing it to 1000 left me with 4 or 5. I'm not sure why Chunking is causing the problem, but not using it solves this issue.

[NorthEast]

Have you contacted support on this one?

As a side note, not is a special search term; i.e. not test means topics that don't contain 'test'.