Partial search in HTML help?

[gewriter_2]

When trying to enter a partial search in HTML help, I get 'No topics found.'

I have 'Show Advanced search' checked in the skin file. Other HTML help files (such as the one for Internet Explorer) allow users to do a partial search. For example, if I'm looking for a topic 'Enter provider information' and type 'Enter provider' in the search field, it's not returning any results, when I expect that it would.

Is this an issue specific to Flare, or am I missing something in the setup?

[Pete Lees]

Hi, Rachel,

Is the search function completely broken, or can you get it to return some results when you search for single words or other search criteria?

Which options have you selected at the bottom of the Search tab, if any, and are you enclosing the search string in quotation marks (which indicates that you want to search for the literal phrase "Enter provider")?

There's some detailed information on how to use the search function here:

http://helpware.net/htmlhelp/hhfindingtext.htm

Pete

[gewriter_2]

Hi Pete,

Thanks for your quick reply. The search functions when you enter in the entire topic title. On further investigation of this issue, it looks like the submitter of our issue is expecting the search to use % logic to find items. What I find most curious about this whole issue, is that if I have the 'Match similar words' option checked, and if I search for 'enter prov' (no quotation marks), the search displays topics containing the words 'enter' and/or 'provider', but the topic 'Enter provider information' is not in the search results.

[Pete Lees]

Hi, again,

I think there's something slightly odd about the results that you're getting when you search for enter prov. This means "find all topics that contain both the words 'enter' and 'prov' (or minor grammatical variations of these words)". Therefore, I wouldn't expect this search to find topics that contain either word but not both, as the two words are joined by an implicit AND operator (not OR); only topics containing both words should appear in the search results.

Also, ''prov" ought to be too truncated a word to return any results at all. As I understand it, the "match similar words" feature should operate this way (quoted from Microsoft's HTML Help FAQ page):

The Match similar words option uses Western-language rules for determining suffixes and finds all occurrences of a given word that include common suffixes. For example, a search for "run" will find words such as "run," running," and "runner." The word "runtime" will not be found.

So, this is a fairly sophisticated type of search, but not sophisticated enough to match instances of the word "provider" with the search term "prov". In my test file, a search for enter prov returns no results, which is what I'd expect. On the other hand enter prov* does return the expected results because I'm using the wildcard character to stand for all the other characters in the word "provider".

Perhaps it would be worth adding some topics to your help file that describe how to use the advanced search features? Microsoft provides a set of redistributable help topics that you can customise and add to your help project:

Help for the HTML Help Viewer (Viewhlp.chm)

Pete

[gewriter_2]

Hi Pete,

Thanks for your reply. The Web sites you linked helped me figure out the issue and find a way to resolve it. Thanks for all your help.