Exclude individual elements from search abstract

[kellyh_hochanadel]

Is there a way to exclude an individual HTML element from the search abstract paragraph that appears in the search results page? For example, all our API topics have a floating navigation div at the top that allows the user to jump to an anchor point (request, response, etc.). However, since this is the first thing that appears in the body of the topic, the search results for these topics look something like this:

EarlyWarning
Topic navigation Data POST Sample integration URIs Request XML Request elements Data response Response XML Response elements Alert elements Error codes The EarlyWarning method retrieves subscriber alert records for the Early Warning Service (EWS). EWS sends alerts when someone uses a subscriber's ...
SMS/NonCredit/EarlyWarning.htm

This removes all context from the search results and the user isn't sure which topic is the one they're looking for. Ideally, I'd like to place some kind of condition on the navigation div that would keep it from being picked up by the search abstract. Not sure if this is possible or not, but I'm curious whether anyone else has run into this?

[doc_guy]

Are you using Relationship tables on your master page to get this? Or are you creating these in some manual fashion that Flare doesn't know about?

You may not like this answer, but I believe you can override the text that is displayed in the search results in the properties of the topic:

[doc_guy]

Here is the topic in Flare 11's help that shows you how this works:

http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... Topics.htm

[Nita Beck]

I have the same issue in a client's project in which, similar to the OP's design, we've got a table of xrefs above the first heading in the majority of topics. For various design reasons (and, frankly, to get around a bug), we have elected not to use meta descriptions, so we're stuck. And not only do the search abstracts include all this extraneous material, but because the algorithm by which results are calculated is considering stuff that it should ignore, the prioritization of results is all off.

Incidentally, if we build the project from Flare 10, the above-the-heading content is not included in the search abstract.

I've actually just reported this as a bug in Flare 11.

[kellyh_hochanadel]

Thanks for the responses! It'll take me some time to do those descriptions, but it's better than having the nav stuff in the search abstract!

[TechOnTheBrain]

Just in case this helps anyone else who stumbles across this thread with a similar issue:

I had a similar problem to the OP. For many topics, I wanted to prevent the first paragraph of text from appearing in the search abstract. I found a workaround to achieve this; but it might not work across all existing versions of Flare, and could break in future versions if the behaviour is changed or there is a bug:

Put the first paragraph inside a table cell — then Flare ignores it for the search abstract. Of course, it does mean that you have to edit every relevant topic to put the first paragraph inside a table cell. But this was acceptable for my purposes.

[Psider]

The Madcap elements like the menu proxy have a class of 'nocontent' added to them and don't appear in the search abstract. I wonder adding this class to a div around the content would prevent Flare using it?

(It's possible the class could vary depending on the output, so if might also pay to check using the developer tools.)

[TechOnTheBrain]

PSider — interesting, thanks. I've overcome my problem for the time being per my workaround, but it'd still be good to see if your hypothesis works out. If I find time to give it a proper work out I'll report back.