Dear Guys !
I have Download the new offline archive chm file ! but it doesnt have Indexing or searching feature ! how can users search within this file without any searching feature and find their answers ?

Hi

As I said in the announcement, a search index is NOT included. To create a comparable search index for the .chm file I would need to extract the keywords that exist in the boards' search index MySql database, which as I remember is *VERY* large, and somehow incorporate them into a .chm search index (.hhk) file which will link to each and every occurrence of the search phrase. Without going into the details, I'll just say it would not be an easy task.

However, I may be able to create a search index in another way, I've noticed there exists an "HHK Builder" application which is used to create an index file from the content of the HTML files in a .chm project. As the .chm file I created is composed of 4000+ html files, it might be an interesting experiment to see how well it works. Hopefully it will create the required multiple linking and not just a list of unlinked words.

If it works reasonably well I'll include a search index in the next version, but chances are it won't be comparable to the boards' built-in search index, so you're still back to searching the board online.

I was trying to keep the file size down to a reasonable level (already 6Mb zipped), for those on dialup, who I figured would most benefit from being able to explore the informational posts contained herein offline. Besides, the file was meant for archive/historical purposes and for leasurly browsing, not simply as a convenient forum search replacement. But I do agree a search index would be useful and I'll see what I can do.

Kayaker

You might try using "Search and Replace" by Funduc.

Pretty fast, and will search the more than 4000+ html files in a jiffy.

Have Phun

Was that for me or him? ;-)

I do use a search/replace function on the html files prior to compiling to redirect the links to the server properly, etc., but that could be another option for searching... I believe .chm files can be decompiled back to their html files, though I've never looked into it. Then a search could be done. But that isn't really a great solution.

To update - I tried the HHK Builder app and it sucked. It created an .hhk index file of 16+Mb, the index "words" often included complete or partial post text, plus the HHW Workshop app crashed when compiling it.

That's the bad news. The good news is I created a *Search* tab (as opposed to an Index tab), and this worked reasonably well. For Advanced Search capabilities (boolean/wildcard) it only increased the .chm file to 9+Mb. Unfortunately the html files *all* have the same Title page <title></title> tags, so you may get 400 hits for "Asprotect" all with the thread name as 'RCE Messageboard's Regroupment'. You see this problem as well in the existing Favorites tab. I see no easy search/replace solution to that however, to try to give each html page a unique thread title by default. It's better than nothing, just not ideal.

The "Archives" feature at the bottom of the page (from which I generate the html files), is simply a .php script with a .css style sheet that displays the threads in the database in a different format. This format seemed the most friendly, which is why I used it. The other option is to create a .chm file with the default board format, but this is messy plus most of the features would have to be removed else the file would be many MB's larger. The Archives compilation with a Search function should remain around 10Mb for while, but will continue to grow.

To give each page a unique title one solution might be to come up with some kind of script which would reference the index pages (26 of them) and change the appropriate Title tags in the 4000 html files. If some php guru wanted to try, I could give them a few representative html files to attempt that... It could also be done as a specialized regular expression string search/replace app I suppose. The other "problem" is that Code tags, and as mentioned before Quote tags, are not included in the Archives feature, but this is a bug/design of the VBulletin script itself.

In the next few days or so I'll create a new file with a Search function and maybe a new page which will contain the most updated .chm file.

Cheers,
Kayaker

Ok, the php code is now patched, all thread pages will have the correct title from now on. Looking forward to a chm-file with nice search results. Great work with the chm archive file Kayaker!

This is going to be SWEET !

-nt20

Yup. I've tested the nice mod (one further change to be made) and recompiled the chm file with what seems to be a pretty good regular expression search capability (however HHW manages that internally). Funny, I test it with "asprotect" and get 392 hits, on the board only 356. Remember though, this isn't going to be updated on a daily basis!

1K.

hi,guy,where download the chm file?
tell me the URL,please!
thanx!

Registered User ! plz pay attention !

VisualCHM is a good compiler/decompiler for help files.

hxxp://www.vchm.com/

ciao