What causes generation of index entries?

[ann.jensen]

Hi,
I have just used a ditaval file to publish a webhelp output from my ditamap. I notice that topics that I filtered out using my ditaval file are still showing in the index. Is this because I have references to these topics in conrefs and/or reltables?
Also does the same processing influence search results?
Thanks in advance,
Ann

[radu_pisoi]

Hi,

Yes, you are right.

A topic that is referenced from your publication using one of the DITA referencing mechanism (conref, xref or reltable) will be published(converted to HTML) even if it is filtered from the DITA map.

In this case, the topic is also processed when the WebHelp indexterms page is created and also when the index associated with the WebHelp search engine is generated.

However, if you want to filter some topics for the WebHelp search engine you can use the webhelp.search.custom.excludes.file transformation parameter. The parameter value is a path of the file that contains name patterns for HTML files that should not be indexed by the WebHelp search engine. Each line of this file is taken to be an exclude pattern. The patterns are considered relative paths, relative to the output directory. '*' matches zero or more characters, '?' matches one character. You can read more about patterns here: https://ant.apache.org/manual/dirtasks.html#patterns