Question about subprojects

[vivianyangsh]

Details

By following https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subprojects.html, we configured project b,c,d as the subproject of a, expecting that these projects will share search index.

We hosted the docs in our own server, so not a project on readthedocs.

Expected Result

When I search in project a, search engine should search among a and its subprojects.

Actual Result

When I search in project a with a keyword that appears in b, no result is returned.

Question

Is this working as designed? How to achieve my expected result?

[stsewd]

I'm not sure if that's by design, but if not, looks like a feature request.

[vivianyangsh]

@stsewd Thanks so much!

In the documentation, it is said Projects that are configured as subprojects will share a search index with their parent and sibling projects. This is currently the only way to share search indexes between projects, we do not yet support sharing search indexes between arbitrary projects.

So that I am figuring that the expected behavior should be what's designed. Can you please help confirm. If not, then, yes, this is definitely a new feature needed;-) For big documentation projects that spread among several repos, we need the search to happen in all repos.

[stsewd]

oh, I didn't read that. I think that should work, I'll investigate a little more.

[agjohnson]

This is a feature already built into RTD search. You need elastic search setup and the correct indexes. Unless there is a more specific problem with search indexing, I don't think there is much we can act on here. Perhaps stack overflow is better place for a support question like this?

Closing for now. If you have a bug report, feel free to reopen.

[stsewd]

@agjohnson I tested this on the .org site, looks like it doesn't work there.

Main project: https://rtd-test-stsewd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/search.html?q=eric&check_keywords=yes&area=default

Subproject https://rtd-test-stsewd.readthedocs.io/projects/stsewd-demo/en/latest/

[stsewd]

This also doesn't work in the another way

Main project: https://rtd-test-stsewd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/search.html?q=change&check_keywords=yes&area=default#

Subproject https://rtd-test-stsewd.readthedocs.io/projects/stsewd-demo/en/latest/search.html?q=change&check_keywords=yes&area=default

[agjohnson]

I'm seeing bad search results even just searching those projects for terms that should be locally indexed, so this probably is a problem with indexing in general, not a problem with this indexing feature.

For example, I get results that back down to Sphinx results here:
https://rtd-test-stsewd.readthedocs.io/projects/stsewd-demo/en/latest/search.html?q=Eric&check_keywords=yes&area=default

This term exists in the local document, I'd expect this in our results

[stsewd]

Just commenting that we solve this rebuilding the project