How to do a full text search against DocOps documentation

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

This method allows you to do a full text search against DocOps product documentation.

The DocOps "Search" is strong, but like a Google Search, it only searches so far down a page for terms. 

This means that searching for specific strings will return "Search returned no results." if they are beyond this limit.

This workaround allows you to download PDFs and use the fast searching within your PDF reader to find ALL strings that exist in the documentation.

This is very useful for those people who depend on finding all exact terms within a document, such as Application Administrators and Support Staff.

Here is a worked example, using the CA IT Service Management DocOps space as an example. But it can be applied to any documentation source.

Environment

The DocOps site. 

For example, https://docops.ca.com/ca-service-management/17-2/en.

Cause

Inbuilt page index limit within the main search engines.

Resolution

Please see the attached document "How to do Full Text Searches against DocOps Documentation.docx" for all images and formatting. 

How to do Full Text Searches against DocOps Documentation

 

Overview

This example will be to download all of the CA Service Management - 17.2 documentation, and use Adobe Acrobat to conduct a full text search on it.

Caution: The downloaded document will not be a “live” document.

Please use the DocOps documentation where currency is required. This method best suits data that does not change significantly over the longer term, or where the latest news is not essential. Please open the DocOps documentation to check for any updates if performing any significant task, such as an upgrade.

This overcomes the issue that search engines only index the first part of pages. They will not find terms near the end of pages, such as this one: usm-udm:OriginatingURL

 

Steps

1. Open the DocOps documentation

 

Navigate to the relevant product documentation home page.

https://docops.ca.com/ca-service-management/17-2/en

 

2. Open all document sections

 

Right click and Open in a New Tab each section that you wish to have in your final document.

For this example, we will download everything except the “Announcements” section.

 

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3. Download each PDF section

 

Either click the “PDF” section and download the whole section. If you click the PDF icon, it will download the whole section to your “Downloads” folder. If you right click and choose “Save as…” you may choose the target direction destination.

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Here the “Installation” section has been saved to the “Downloads” folder.

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Continue until all of the required sections have been downloaded.

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4. Merge each PDF into one.

This is an optional step, but it can make document searching easier. It is not necessary.

Use your PDF Merge tool of choice. Here, I have used “Smallpdf” - but you may use any you wish.

https://smallpdf.com

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Simple drag and drop each file into the merger. Then click “Merge PDF!”

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5. You now have a single merged PDF file

 

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6. Search the PDF in a PDF Reader

 

Search either in one of the individual documents that was downloaded, or search against the single “merged” document.

The results are found in the left pane, and you can jump to the relevant page which is displayed in the right pane.

 

End of document.