Question

I am building a simple website that needs to be able to run completely offline if needs be. With the intention of being a 50+ page searchable reference manual.

I need the whole site to be cached upon opening one page. I’m doing this with the appcache manifest and getting the site to cache and be viewed on an offline mobile seems to work ok.

The site has a basic JavaScript search facility (that was a freeware download) and while online this search works perfectly. As soon as the internet connection is stopped and the cached version is used the search no longer works, displaying one of two symptoms 1. Button is clicked and nothing happens or 2. A ‘webpage cannot be found’ kind of error is displayed.

Answer 1

Quote from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Using_the_application_cache#Gotchas

Never access cached files by using traditional GET parameters (like
other-cached-page.html?parameterName=value). This will make the
browser bypass the cache and attempt to get it from network. To link
to cached resources that have parameters parsed in JavaScript use
parameters in the hash part of the link, such as
other-cached-page.html#whatever?parameterName=value.

But that is exactly what your js-search does. It tries to load the subpages like this “http://www.filemanage.co.uk/offline/index.html?1350563635665” using XHR.

As a fix try this

// change in function sendRequest line 228 from 
this.httpRequest.open("GET", uri+"?"+q, true);
// to
this.httpRequest.open("GET", uri, true);