WebHelp search hangs instead of returning "no topics found"

[Hammer_Chick]

When I search on a term that is not in the help, a box that says  "Loading data, please wait..." appears in the search results pane instead of "No topics found."  Once the box appears, I cannot get rid of it without closing the Help tab and starting over. If I leave it there it obscures the results of subsequent searches.

This happens in both IE 7 and Firefox.

I generate the WebHelp on Windows and it gets installed on a Linux platform.

Anybody know what's going on?

[Hammer_Chick]

Ack! It has nothing to do with Windows vs. Linux. Apparently the WebHelp is generating more whfwdatan.xml files than in the previous release and for n > 5 the build wasn't copying the files to the Linux server. Therefore search terms starting with the letters s-z resulted in 404 errors, which weren't being handled properly. We can fix the proximate cause by fixing the build to copy whfwdata6 thru 8 to the server.

So I amend my question to what can I do to prevent file not found from hanging WebHelp?

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

So the search was hanging because it was unable to locate missing files.

Methinks you misunderstand...

Hammer Chick wrote:

Ack! It has nothing to do with Windows vs. Linux. Apparently the WebHelp is generating more whfwdatan.xml files than in the previous release and for n > 5 the build wasn't copying the files to the Linux server. Therefore search terms starting with the letters s-z resulted in 404 errors, which weren't being handled properly. We can fix the proximate cause by fixing the build to copy whfwdata6 thru 8 to the server.

So I amend my question to what can I do to prevent file not found from hanging WebHelp?

How many of the XML files are created depends on the content of your help system! Smaller systems may create perhaps five of these files while larger systems may create twenty, thirty or more.

The answer is amazingly simple. Copy everything in the output folder to the server.

Cheers... Rick

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[Hammer_Chick]

Thanks. Yes, I got my developers to make the build copy everything in the folder. That fixes it.

However, for my own debugging purposes, I would like to know how to find out that that WebHelp is encountering 404 without having to trace the transaction with Wireshark to find out what file it's looking for. If WebHelp could give an error message that said "file not found xyzabz78.xml" instead of hanging, that would be great.

Meanwhile, all is now well here.