As you may have noticed in my earlier Scratches in the table , I prefer to make chicken stock or chicken soup the old-fashioned way instead of using those prepared bouillon cubes. Even using real chicken is a bit problematic. Why? I don't know if you have ever wondered why chicken is so cheap these days. Not (only) because of H5N1 a.k.a. Avian Influenza a.k.a. Bird Flu, but because the cheap chicken fillets you'll find aren't 100% meat at all. You would be amazed what one does with chicken meat in order to make as much profit as possible and end up with only 60% proper meat. First of all they inject imported salted chicken from Brazil and Thailand with water in order to make it heavier and more palatable. However, the meat can't hold that much water, so one injects proteins too. The proteins are derived from pork or beef. As such, it isn't illegal, as long as it is properly indicated. T hat's where the shoe pinches. One “forgets” to put the content of the meat on the labels. “ Bad luck” if you think that you buy meat which isn't abhorrent with your religion. Ultimately, you should breed and slaughter your own chickens in order to be absolutely sure. The latter isn't something for the faint-hearted, certainly not when the chicken concerned escapes and runs beheaded on its convulsions. I know it sounds a bit far-fetched, but that's rather similar to what's happened to the SDN site too.
You must have been staying on Mars if you haven't noticed the recent changes at the SDN site over the last couple of weeks. Things didn't always run as smoothly as the SDN admins and the SDN community wanted. However – you might have an aversion to my chicken meat story, so I will use a more attractive metaphor - one can't make the perfect omelette without breaking good eggs. In the SDN case it was maybe an ostrich egg, but they managed after all. Btw, one said to me that a perfect omelette should be as soft as a baby's bottom. He was also a good food enthusiast like Rick Stein and lesser gods like me. It seems that other people within SDN are also food devotees, so we might launch a SDN Good Food User Group (SDN-GFUG).
Speaking of a smooth transition you might wonder where this web log is heading. Don't worry, I'm getting there.
If you still haven't found what you're looking for
The first thing one notices in the new SDN site is it's new structure. I'm not speaking of the content as such but rather the underlying structure where all this content resides. You've certainly seen that the web logs no longer reside under https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/ but under https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/ . All this is covered by a redirection in case the old structure is still used somewhere. Unfortunately, not all links are redirected properly at the moment. The link in this forum thread text size is redirected to the home page. However, I'm sure that this minor flaw will soon be fixed.
Something that won't be solved automatically is the SDN search engine plugin for Mozilla/Firefox. The new search engine takes advantage of the new site structure too. You might remember from my Foxy ISO SDN 4 LTR web log that the URL of the search engine was rather complicated due to the inline encoded URL. An additional difficulty was the length of that search URL. That was also problematic when making bookmarklets in MIE, as mentioned in MIE ISO SDN 4 LTR 2. That all vanished with the structure/search engine. Now, it all comes to the URL https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/search with the parameters QueryString, Query, SearchPluginName and SelectedCustomProps. All these parameters remain the same.
Caught in speed
All this meant that I needed to revise and update the code I used in the above-mentioned web logs and the Digging in the dirt. While I was still in the phase of discovering all the changes, and working out how to tackle the several updates, Tim Boettger had already updated the search plugin. I'm very gratefully for that. It made the revision of the rest of the code easier. The result of the revision can be found at this SDN sear plugin zip and the code of it, together with the bookmarklets can be found at this code sample. Instructions on installation can be found in the earlier mentioned web logs.
Conclusion
As you can see, searching SDN has been never as simple as today. Does this mean that it is perfect now? I'm afraid that I need to deny this. There are still some things that could do with some improvement. The search engine still shows dead links for SAP documentation and repeats the same information a lot. The main reason for that is the jumble of version related information in help.sap.com. This site tends to repeat all information for each version of a SAP component whether it's changed or not. Is there a solution for that? The info has different URLs after all. I don't know, but search engines like Clusty, seems to have found a solution for this. Furthermore, logical operators don't work in the search engine. Specifying search engine or search and engine or +search +engine give all a note (43394) as first result entry back. The problem is that this note doesn't even contain the word engine . Specifying “search engine” gives a better result but then it's searching for consecutive words.
Finally, the old sore: Firefox/Mozilla support. When one searches with Firefox, one always gets these kinds of warning. Firefox is a bit more strict on things when it comes to security. My niggling – after all I need to comply with my doubtful reputation of the grumpy old man - ends with drawing attention to the fact that the enter key doesn't work in the Advanced Search and one needs to click on the Go button each time.
