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Starting help system webapp [message #475624]

Wed, 03 June 2009 15:40

Bert Vingerhoets

Messages: 5
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Hi,

I'm trying to integrate documentation into a headless server application
running on the Eclipse platform so that the help pages can be consulted
with a browser.

As far as I understand the system, one way to start the 'help' webapp is
to use the org.eclipse.help.standalone.Help or
org.eclipse.help.standalone.InfoCenter classes. However, these start a new
instance of Eclipse, which is silly because I already have one running.

At the moment I'm calling
org.eclipse.help.internal.base.BaseHelpSystem.ensureWebappRu nning() and
ignoring the warnings about discouraged access. The problem with this
approach is that I can't seem to configure the webapp's port (unless I
pass the -Dserver_port VM argument, which is not an option as we have a
centralized configuration file which should contain this kind of setting).

Is there an API (that allows specifying critical parameters such as
listening port) to get the help webapp started from an Eclipse-based
application?

Regards,
Bert Vingerhoets

Originally posted to news.eclipse.platform under the same subject

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Re: Starting help system webapp [message #475629 is a reply to message #475624]

Wed, 03 June 2009 21:49

Chris Goldthorpe

Messages: 815
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

You could try something like this

System.setProperty("server_port", "8081");
PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getHelpSystem().resolve("", false);

to start the help system on port 8081

It seems that there should be a cleaner way of setting the port through
API but right now there is no way to do it.

Bert Vingerhoets wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to integrate documentation into a headless server application
> running on the Eclipse platform so that the help pages can be consulted
> with a browser.
>
> As far as I understand the system, one way to start the 'help' webapp is
> to use the org.eclipse.help.standalone.Help or
> org.eclipse.help.standalone.InfoCenter classes. However, these start a
> new instance of Eclipse, which is silly because I already have one running.
>
> At the moment I'm calling
> org.eclipse.help.internal.base.BaseHelpSystem.ensureWebappRu nning() and
> ignoring the warnings about discouraged access. The problem with this
> approach is that I can't seem to configure the webapp's port (unless I
> pass the -Dserver_port VM argument, which is not an option as we have a
> centralized configuration file which should contain this kind of setting).
>
> Is there an API (that allows specifying critical parameters such as
> listening port) to get the help webapp started from an Eclipse-based
> application?
>
>
> Regards,
> Bert Vingerhoets
>
> Originally posted to news.eclipse.platform under the same subject
>

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Re: Starting help system webapp [message #475632 is a reply to message #475629]

Thu, 04 June 2009 06:25

Bert Vingerhoets

Messages: 5
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Thank you for your reply.

The PlatformUI way of starting the help system I already found out by
reverse engineering (it's the way the workbench starts the visual help
when navigating to the menu Help > Help Contents). However, as I said, I'm
working on a headless server application. So I have no PlatformUI and no
Workbench.

Thank you for the setProperty tip though. It slipped my mind.

Regards,
Bert Vingerhoets

Chris Goldthorpe wrote:

> You could try something like this

> System.setProperty("server_port", "8081");
> PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getHelpSystem().resolve("", false);

> to start the help system on port 8081

> It seems that there should be a cleaner way of setting the port through
> API but right now there is no way to do it.

Report message to a moderator