Search across manuals

[Eric Lachance]

Hi there!

Has anyone had any experience with implementing a search across multiple manuals? Ideally, I would like for this feature to be implemented straight into the WebHelp's search (since that's where people actually do the search normally). I understand that this would require hijacking the MadCapAll.js file, obviously... which I'm not sure is permitted in the EULA.

[NorthEast]

What format are your 'multiple manuals' - WebHelp?

If you're talking about searching across several WebHelp targets, then you can already do that in Flare by merging them.

First you'd set up a master project (as a container), then in its TOC you'd add the other project targets to merge in.

See:
http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ojects.htm

[Eric Lachance]

Yes I'm using WebHelp, but I don't actually want to merge the outputs.

The 5 manuals I have are:
- Workflow Tools User Guide (Software 1)
- Design User Guide (Software 2)
- Search User Guide (Software 3)
- Scripting Reference Guide (Valid for Design, software 2)
- Trigger & Data Capture (Valid for both software 1 and 2)

I will add a different manual soon, which will be a knowledge base, which is related to all the above manuals (it's about error messages, FAQs, KB articles, etc).

What's happening now is that people are going in the Design User Guide and doing a search for error messages that appear in the software and, because we have a different location for these messages and solutions, they don't get any results. Similarly they'll look for keywords from our in-house scripting language in the "wrong" manual. At the moment I have a temporary solution which is to have all the scripting language keywords in the design user guide and the link from that page to the correct guide, but the user needs to do the search again when they're in the right one. I don't really want to repeat the same experience with the KB articles and error messages.

We don't have any plans (or desire) to merge all the manuals together.

[LTinker68]

So why not do something similar to what MadCap does with their knowledgebase? You put everything in one project and have just one output.

Your top-level folders in the output's TOC would correspond to your various manuals. The search would encompass all of those manuals since they're all in one output, but you could give the users the option to narrow their search by restricting it to one manual, like MadCap's KB does on their search pane by providing a product filter.

[NorthEast]

If you want Flare's search to include topics from other projects/targets, then I think the only options within Flare are to use either project merging, or combine them using a project import (global project linking).

I think WebHelp Plus does some sort of run-time merging; however, it's not something I've ever tried (or seen), so I don't know how the output differs to project merging.

Your top-level folders in the output's TOC would correspond to your various manuals. The search would encompass all of those manuals since they're all in one output, but you could give the users the option to narrow their search by restricting it to one manual, like MadCap's KB does on their search pane by providing a product filter.

Yep, that's an alternative. To use search filters, you'd have to use a project import (global project linking). You'd also need to add concept markers to each topic, based on what you want to filter them by.

[Eric Lachance]

Thanks guys... I guess I'll need to do my own outside-the-box thinking then.

[Steveman]

That's essentially what I've ended up doing. I have 11 manuals and a knowledgebase as well as Word and PDF docs that I needed included in the search. I tried merging at runtime but that just created more problems. Final solution was to import all of the other content into the main project using global linking. Now if I make a change in one of the manuals I can re-import the update into the key project and re-publish. I use a Global Project to store all of the formatting stuff and this way ensure that my stylesheet, search filter and concepts are the same across all of them.

Just about to go-live with it (if we can get the contents to display and the search to work - all the same problems on the web server that I've been having on my local machine for the last few months). So this is all good in theory, I'll come back to you in 6 months and suggest how it should be done.....