User Assistance Plan for Eclipse 3.7

By Chris Goldthorpe, IBM. Last revised 09/21/2010

Background

All of the feature requests for Eclipse 3.7 can be found in Bugzilla. Below is a summary of the planned new features together with a link to the corresponding Bugzilla entry which contains more information.

Milestone 2 09/17/2010

[Help] Allow for dynamic filter scopes to be created at runtime
Allows Eclipse based products to support multiple help system filters which can depend upon the product configuration.

Milestone 3 10/29/2010

[Help] Allow redefinition of Eclipse Help Contents menu item URL
This is required to allow other help presentations to be supported, including Web 2.0 help systems.

[Help] Test connection should actually check for validity of Information Center
Allows users to better diagnose remote help connection problems.

[Webapp] Need an indication that a filter has been applied
Provides users with visual feedback when the help contents are filtered

[Help][Search] Help Contents UI enhancements (involving search scope)
Many users have found the search scope dialog confusing to use. These enhancements will improve the usability of this dialog.

Milestone 4 12/10/2010

Indicators for Remote UA enablement
Enables the help system to indicate the origin ( local or remote server) of a help page.

[Help] Allow filtering in help view toc, related topics and index views
In Eclipse 3.6 filtering was implemented in the help web application, but due to time constraints not in the help view. In Eclipse 3.7 the help view will support the same modes of filtering as the help Webapp.

[Intro] Adapt to changes made in platform UI intro support for Eclipse 3.7 and 4.1
Required for full Intro support in Eclipse 4.1.

Milestone 5 01/28/2011

Allow pre-processesing steps to the Help Search button
Allows Eclipse based products to improve the quality of search ranking by modifying the search query.

[Help] Promote main help servlets to public API
Formalizes the API provided by the servlets in the help system.

Milestone 6 (API Freeze) 03/11/2011