builddocsearchdb error "There is no installed product with this help location."

I am trying to make a custom toolbox with documentation following the steps on https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2018a/matlab/matlab_prog/display-custom-documentation.html. However when trying to build the search database I got the error that "Error using builddocsearchdb (line 32) There is no installed product with this help location. Documentation that is not associated with a product will not be displayed in the help browser."

Looking into builddocsearchdb and executing the commands myself, circumventing the check on line 32 gives a "Could not write search database." error.

The example provided by the builddocsearchdb help with the upslope toolbox (https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2018a/matlab/ref/builddocsearchdb.html) gives the exact same errors.

Any ideas what's wrong? The error did not happen with the earlier 2016a version, but it is present after my upgrade to 2018a.

[Jack Kenney]

The "builddocsearchdb" function requires an absolute path to the "html" folder for the third party toolbox.

If it does not receive the absolute path (e.g. "html" instead of "C:\MATLAB\MyToolbox\html") it will throw this error.

Using

>> builddocsearchdb("C:\MATLAB\MyToolbox\html")

instead of

>> builddocsearchdb(".\html")

may resolve this issue.

Answer 1

[Yury Zontov]

Had the same problem in 2018a and 2017b. Solution steps: 1) Add documentation directory to path - showed validation error in info.xml 2) Fix the validation error 3) builddocsearchdb works!

[zoltanperko]

Thanks! I'm not sure if this also works, but in the end it turned out that even though I had full read-write access, the problem went away simply by running in administrator mode.