Search not working with IE9

[Colum]

I have setup Zoom Search to work with a help file sourced on a server. It all works fine apart from when viewed with Internet Explorer 9. It is fine with Firefox and Chrome. This discounts an issue with the server. The idea is that the user clicks on the "Search" button (see below) which loads the search.html template.



The problem is, nothing happens when you click on it. Can anyone shed any light on what could be going wrong? I am using the Javascript option.

[Ray]

It might be due to the lack or presence of the MOTW (mark of the web) on either your search.html page, or the other pages of your help system, more details here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showth...lt-due-to-MOTW

Basically, when IE decides a link goes to a page that it considers to be in a different security "zone", it will obliquely do nothing and not even give you an error message. The above is one reason why it considers the page to be in a different "zone" than the others. Let us know if this is/isn't the case.

[Colum]

Of course. Yes I should have thought of that. Thanks for the info. That worked. In fact I had the MOTW set on the help project used to create the HTML files for the help. However the search template was created elsewhere and it didn't have the relevant tag. It does now.

[Colum]

Actually I spoke too soon. It is broke again. To give you some more information to what I am doing and some other information I have found.

I am producing a help file of around 2k HTML files. The help file has a skin with a button that accesses the search.html file. I have created a custom search.html with our own CSS. It all works perfectly in Firefox and Chrome but in IE8 and IE9 it doesn't. We just get a blank page. Initially I noticed that we did not have the MOTW in the HTML. we added this as <!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->. We have even tried adding the actual URL that is called by our application to no effect.

I've got others to try to access the search using IE9 (the same as me) and they get part of the search.html displayed - the custom CSS bit - but no search box. This is despite the JavaScript file being present in the same directory. I don't even get that! I've tried on other PCs using IE8 and they also get the white screen of death.

What is weird is that I've discovered that there are three different versions of the search.html file in the generated help file directory. This is despite a conditional tag being appied in the project to prevent them being published. This maybe a read herring but...


- First it is created in the root help file directory.
- Second it is also created in the help file's skin directory.
- Third the correct file is in the Search directory as expected. I copied it there.

Just in case this is relevant, I am using the JavaScript option and specifying the Search Script Path in the Advanced options. The search.html file is present in the output directory when I index.

Does anyone have any idea why IE is being some difficult?

[Ray]

Hard to say without seeing the page ourselves. I would guess there's some error messages in the browser's JavaScript console window (hit F12 for the Developer Tools in IE, and go to the "Console" or "Script" tab). This should show you where the problem occurred.

In regards to your multiple copies of "search.html", Zoom only ever creates the file in the Output directory you specify. So if it is being "created" in any other directories, it would be your help authoring program doing this, and we don't really know anything about it to know why or what it is doing in this manner. If you are linking to the wrong file then certainly that could be a problem.

If you can show us the pages then we can be of more help.

[Colum]

I have managed to get my output working in IE. It turned out that the issue was with the HTML in the search.html file. As we wanted to use a custom version of the search template, the file had been created in our HTML Editor and placed in the appropriate output directory. Custom CSS was then applied to it. What I ended up doing was creating the standard search.html file from ZoomSearch and manually amending it with the required HTML and CSS. All worked OK.

We do still have the three versions of files which is a bit of a puzzle but two of them are not referenced by anything so the correct version works as intended. If I find out what causes these to be generated, I post this solution too.