settings.asp

[suzy]

I may have gone completely mad, but my settings.asp file seems to be blank. I'm sure it's not supposed to be ... I've reinstalled zoom, but it's still blank and I think it is the reason why I'm getting the following error on the search page:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0005'

Invalid procedure call or argument

/Search/search.asp, line 646

I'm very confused as this worked perfectly in the past - I don't know what's gone wrong and why!

[David]

The settings file is not created when you install the Zoom indexer. The settings file is created at the end of the indexing process. So each time you re-index your site the settings file will be re-created in the output directory you select.

[suzy]

But there should be something in it, right? I've reindexed several times, but each time the settings.asp is blank.

[David]

If you are trying to 'look' at the settings file using your browser it will appear empty as it is an ASP file that is executed on the server. But if you look at the file using Notepad or a text editor you can see the ASP source code. It should never be empty with viewed with Notepad. Does it have zero length?

If you still have a problem, check you have the latest version of Zoom, then index your site and post the last part of the Zoom log. You should see something like this,

06:56:14 - [FILEIO] Created dates data file (zoom_datetime.zdat)
06:56:14 - [FILEIO] Created script settings file (settings.asp)
06:56:14 - INDEX SUMMARY
06:56:14 - Files scanned: 2
06:56:14 - Files skipped: 12

[suzy]

I've now solved the problem. I made a copy of my config file & plugins folder elsewhere, uninstalled zoom, cleared every remnant left manually including the output folder, then reinstalled. The first time I indexed it all behaved perfectly.

I don't know why it went wrong, but at least it is working again!

(And yes, I know asp files would look blank if you're looking at them in a wysiwyg viewer - I used Dreamweaver code view and notepad to look at it - settings.asp was properly blank as in no code in it at all - now it has lots! It had a file size of 0kb previously and is now up to 4kb)

[Ray]

My guess is you may have opened settings.asp in an external program (like Notepad or Dreamweaver) at one point, which held the file opened while you were indexing. Zoom would have most likely reported an error that it could not write to the settings file.

Just a reminder that you should never open or modify the settings.asp file. And if you are unfamiliar with scripting, it is possible that whatever app you used could actually break things - some applications will "intelligently" strip out code it deems unnecessary for example.