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WebHelp Responsive: Issue with unwanted topics being searchable in the output

Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 3:30 pm
by Anonymous1
Hi,

we've come across an issue with the WebHelp Responsive output.

Situation: We use several shared topics that contain contents such as parameter lists that are used in several other topics. Those shared topics are not referenced in the ditamap but only serve as source for other topics. Normally, those shared topics are therefore not part of the WebHelp output.

Problem: Now we've discovered that in one documentation project, those shared topics are part of the output. You'll find them when you are using the WebHelp search. They are not available via the table of contents. Each of those shared topics is output in its own HTML file.

Strangely, this is only the case in some documentation projects, not in all. And not since forever, but since a few months as far as I can tell.

I am running out of ideas to check where we did something wrong. Do you have an idea? Wrong setting in the transformation scenario parameters? Wrong setting in the ditamaps? Wrong setting in the framework (however, some documentation projects build just fine)?

We are using Oxygen 19 with a custom framework and DITA 2.4.4.

Thanks,
Benjamin

Re: WebHelp Responsive: Issue with unwanted topics being searchable in the output

Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 11:48 am
by Costin
Hi B-E-N,

It is possible to filter certain topics to be excluded from Search in the output in a couple of ways:
- either set the search="no" attribute on each topic reference from the DITA Map that corresponds to a topic you need the indexer to exclude,
- or (and this might be the better option for you, in case you have a large number of shared topics, in order to avoid editing each of them) by using the webhelp.search.custom.excludes.file transformation parameter, through which you could pass an exclusions file to the scenario, containing the exclusion rules (patterns).

You can find instructions on both methods that you could use to exclude files from search in our User-Guide.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Costin

Re: WebHelp Responsive: Issue with unwanted topics being searchable in the output

Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 2:52 pm
by Anonymous1
Thank you for for the suggestions Costin. But I don't think that this is the solution to my problem.

Before this project I never had to exclude certain topics from the search because they were excluded by default. And for all other projects of ours this is still the case.

We have shared topics that are only used to store information that are referenced by other topics. These shared topics are not supposed to be in the final output and they never were. Until this time. One project seems to have some kind of new setting (maybe implemented by accident by one of us in the team) that puts the shared topics in the output. And makes these shared topics thereby searchable in the WebHelp.

I wonder what could have caused this. Never before was this the case. And it is still not the case for all our other documentation projects.

Re: WebHelp Responsive: Issue with unwanted topics being searchable in the output

Posted: Tue May 22, 2018 2:44 pm
by Costin
Hi Benjamin,

Thank you for the additional details!

Most probably, the container files (the files that hold the content you are then referencing) are referenced in other topics or maps/submaps of your main map. Either there were not referred before and a user may have referred them now, or they were already referred in the past, but had a correct "processing-role" attribute on them, attribute that may have been changed or removed by a refactoring action. To stop them from being included in the output as independent files, you need to make sure that any references to the container topics include the processing-role="resource-only" attribute.

For example, if you reference your container topic using a topicref element, then you should have something like this:
<topicref href="path/to/container.dita" processing-role="resource-only">

Another example, if you use conkeyrefs to extract the content, then the processing-role attribute should be set on the corresponding keydef:
<keydef keys="path/to/reusables-container" href="path/to/container.dita" processing-role="resource-only"/>

Regards,
Costin

Re: WebHelp Responsive: Issue with unwanted topics being searchable in the output

Posted: Thu May 24, 2018 5:20 pm
by Anonymous1
We've found the reason for our issues or at least we were able to pin it to a certain event.

We've updated the DITA OT to 2.4.4 a few months ago. During that process we must have introduced errors. Even though all builds until then never had any errors in the log, some functionality was broken. One of them was the issue I described in this topic.

We've rolled back to 2.0.1 to manage some upcoming documentation releases. Then we will have to figure out where went wrong when updating to 2.4.4

Thanks for your help Costin.