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Help Contents empty [message #637170]

Thu, 04 November 2010 12:58

Christian Reuter

Messages: 34
Registered: October 2010

Member

Hi all,

In my eclipse (3.6 - helios) help browser the contents pane which normally displays the tree of contents is empty.

If I search for some string I get the expected results in the search pane and I can view the results normally.

If I create a new scope I can see that all the contents are actually available. However the contents pane remains empty no matter what I do.

If I set the preferences to display the help in an external browser (Firefox) it works normally and I can see all contents!

I extracted the entire IDE-download into a new directory, started this clean IDE and even created a new (empty) workspace. => No success. The contents pane is emprty.

It must have something to do with the configuration of my computer as the previous test succeeds on other computers.

I checked for error messages in {workspacelocation}\.metadata\.log but it seems that there is nothing useful.
The only message after deleting the log, starting eclipse and opening the help contents is:

!MESSAGE The -clean (osgi.clean) option was not successful. Unable to clean the storage area: E:\eclipse\IDEs\eclipse 3.6 helios\configuration\org.eclipse.osgi

This message obviously comes from starting eclipse with the "-clean" parameter. I do not know why this fails but I suppose this is a different problem.

Can anybody give me a hint what may be causing the problem?

Thx,

chris

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Re: Help Contents empty [message #637508 is a reply to message #637170]

Fri, 05 November 2010 21:44

Chris Goldthorpe

Messages: 815
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

I'm not exactly sure why you are seeing this but in Eclipse 3.6 code was added to filter the help contents based on the scope ( formerly called search scope) and the format of the search scope was made more compact, so stale data could theoretically cause problems, however you cleaned the workbench which should have the effect of clearing out all of the scopes as they are stored in preferences. It also should not make a difference whether you use an external browser since in workbench mode the scope is stored as a preference.

Can you reproduce this problem at will? Does switching the scope to "Show all topics" make any difference?

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Re: Help Contents empty [message #637634 is a reply to message #637508]

Mon, 08 November 2010 07:30

Christian Reuter

Messages: 34
Registered: October 2010

Member

Thank you for your answer chris.

The problem can not be reproduced as it is constantly present and I can not find any way to get anything displayed in the contents pane at all.

Playing around with the scope did not change anything. I tried "all topics" as well as defining a reduced scope and removing all scope definitions again - no success.

In my first post I mentioned that the "-clean" parameter caused an error. This could be fixed meanwhile so that the workspace seems to be cleaned properly. However the problem with the help browser remains.

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Re: Help Contents empty [message #638109 is a reply to message #637634]

Tue, 09 November 2010 23:23

Chris Goldthorpe

Messages: 815
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

I can't figure out why you are seeing the problem only in the built in browser ( which uses IE ) and not in Firefox - the filtering is done on the server side and I would expect it to work the same for any web client.

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Re: Help Contents empty [message #638160 is a reply to message #638109]

Wed, 10 November 2010 09:07

Christian Reuter

Messages: 34
Registered: October 2010

Member

OK - finally fixed it!

The setting "Script ActiveX controls marked safe for scripting" in the internet options of IE make the difference.

Either enabling this setting for the internet zone or adding the localhost (http://127.0.0.1*) to the list of trusted sites solves the problem.

Thx for the help chris!

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