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Standalone help a misnomer? [message #504705]

Tue, 22 December 2009 04:45

Richard Pineger

Messages: 11
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Is it heretical to suggest that the lifecycle of Standalone help, as run from the class org.eclipse.help.standalone.Help, cannot be effectively managed without having a separate application (or scripts) to both start and shutdown? If a separate app is necessary then surely it isn't standalone at all?

I'm being deliberately controversial to encourage someone to help me.

The basic premise is this. However you start the help, clicking close using the X in the top-right corner simply closes the window and doesn't stop the program. I asked a developer to look at this for me and his findings were thus:

"There is quirk on the Windows platform where, because the Help window is launched from a separate UI thread, it's not possible to automatically shut down the application when the Help window is closed (i.e., it still does not shut down cleanly when the user closes the Help window)."

The reason would be that the help was designed to run alongside an RCP application and is not in any way stand alone.

My question is this: Is it possible to use the help as the RCP application on its own, i.e. stand-alone? Is anyone using it that way?

Thanks for your time and effort in advance.

Regards,
Richard

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