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ZOOMIMAGE and Help & Manual

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  • ZOOMIMAGE and Help & Manual

    Firstly not a problem, just a heads-up for those who find themselves using two great products (ZoomSearch and Help & Manual) on the same website.

    When doing so I encountered a scenario where my ZoomSearch search results was showing my configured HTML page icon for some but not all HTML page results. The cause turned out to be the following.

    Help & Manual uses a embedded version of ZoomSearch to create the search within its HTML output. Through its web skins that can include specifying the image to be used for pages in the search results. The file specified is placed in the outputs /images sub-folder and is written into each generated HTML page as a <ZOOMIMAGE> tag entry of /images/<filename>.

    Unfortunately, if you also have ZoomSearch creating a search index for content across your site, it will read that <ZOOMIMAGE> tag in those pages. For those pages, that will override any file image settings you have configured in ZoomSearch.

    As a result, when those pages appear in your search results, they will display a missing icon since the image file that Zoom Search wants to show for those pages isn't in the right location relative to where the search script is running. In my case where I had a configured icon for results that were HTML pages, I suddenly started to see lists of HTML pages where some had the icon (as they were non-Help & Manual generated pages) and some had a missing icon (the Help & Manual generated pages).

    It's not fatal and there are various possible workarounds once you are aware of why this is happening:
    • Place a copy of the image file specified in the Help & Manual skin into an /images sub-folder positioned relative to where the ZoomSearch script is running. In fact, as long as the files have the same name, they don't need to look the same if you want to use different icon depending on whether is a site ZoomSearch set of results or Help & Manual embedded search page.
    • Edit the HTML page template in the Help & Manual skin to not include the <ZOOMIMAGE> tag. That means no icon next to each result in the embedded search.

    I tried both options, they both work. I went for the later since the embedded search occurs in a small navigation pane where every pixel of space is valuable whereas the ZoomSearch results have a full width screen page for results and associated file type icons. I'm sure there are other possible solutions. The key however is knowing why the missing icons are happening so I hope this helps anyone who discovers the same.
    Mark Gallagher

  • #2
    Thanks for sharing!
    --Ray
    Wrensoft Web Software
    Sydney, Australia
    Zoom Search Engine

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