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context help showing wrong content [message #475122]

Tue, 03 March 2009 15:21

Chris Merrill

Messages: 19
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Our product is an an RCP-based app that uses the context-sensitive help (along with
a full manual using the Eclipse help system). We have "infopops" for most of our
views and editors. When focus is inside one of the views/editors and we push F1, we
get the right content. If we then click inside another component which has an
infopop, the "About ..." heading will update correctly to reflect the view that was
selected, but the paragraph below the heading still shows the content related to the
previous view. We can then click a 3rd view and the about heading will again update
correctly but the paragraph below the heading will show the content for the 2nd
view selected. We can rotate between the 3 views/editors and the content is always
one click behind. In any of the three after clicking and seeing the wrong content
(but right heading), we can hit F1 and see the correct content. Also, the "dynamic
help" section shows the correct content at each step, just like the heading of the
"about" section.

I assumed our code was doing something wrong (since we haven't updated this part of
the code for several releases, probably back to Eclipse 3.1) but all the code examples
I found did the same thing we do - in createView() we do this:
PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getHelpSystem().setHelp(parent, "<context_id>");
where parent is the composite passed into createView().

Our editors do fire their own selection events, but the views don't, so that doesn't
seem like a likely cause...but I thought it was worth mentioning.

I should also add that we are currently deploying the with Eclipse 3.3, but one of
our developers has it working with 3.4 in his development environment and it shows
the same behavior.

I can do a screencast, record a video or provide our installer, if it would be helpful
to see the behavior. I can also provide a complete list of the plugins we have
installed....or anything else that would help :>

Any help would be most appreciated! My next step is to try stepping into the Eclipse
code, but I fear that may not be very productive for me without knowing where
to look :(

Thanks in advance!
Chris

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Re: context help showing wrong content - solved [message #475226 is a reply to message #475122]

Wed, 04 March 2009 13:50

Chris Merrill

Messages: 19
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

After stepping through the Eclipse code, I found the source of the problem. Some (most)
of our editors and views were not implementing setFocus() correctly. As a result, the
help viewer was using the newly selected part but then using getDisplay().getFocusControl(),
which was (correctly) returning a Control that was not in the part. The HelpView
does not check this, so it renders the title from the current part, but looks up the
help context for a control that is in another part - and thus displays the wrong
content with the correct title. This happens even if the user clicks within the
view, thus setting focus to a control in the view. At that point, the help has
already been updated.

So the solution, obviously, is to implement setFocus() correctly.

Chris

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