Bugzilla – Full Text Bug Listing
| Summary: | [Help][Doc] cannot configure help server port any more | ||||||
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| Product: | [Eclipse Project] Platform | Reporter: | Markus Keller <markus.kell.r> | ||||
| Component: | User Assistance | Assignee: | platform-ua-inbox <platform-ua-inbox> | ||||
| Status: | RESOLVED FIXED | QA Contact: | |||||
| Severity: | minor | ||||||
| Priority: | P3 | CC: | cgold, ian.leslie | ||||
| Version: | 3.3 | ||||||
| Target Milestone: | 3.5 RC1 | ||||||
| Hardware: | PC | ||||||
| OS: | Windows XP | ||||||
| Whiteboard: | |||||||
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Description
Markus Keller
This may be related to the fact that we are now using Jetty-based servlet OSGi service instead of Tomcat. This preference page was originally intended solely for troubleshooting problems with the help server and was always meant to be temporary. It was removed because all of the functionality you're after is still available in slightly less accessible ways and average users are not expected to perform these tasks. To see which port a given instance of help is running on check the properties of any page/frame in the help system for the port listed in the url. Alternatively you can launch help in an external browser and check the url in the browser for the port. If help is running in infocenter mode, you can check the port by checking the contents "<workspace>/.metadata/.connection". To configure the port that help will use you can use the "org.eclipse.help.appserver/port" property in a plugin_customization.ini file as documented here: http://help.eclipse.org/stable/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/ua_help_setup_preferences.htm The easiest way to do this for an instance of the Eclipse SDK is to edit the existing file at: "<eclipse_home>/plugins/org.eclipse.sdk.<version>/plugin_customization.ini" Also, if you want to keep bookmarks to help pages you should use the new "stable" help system being served at http://help.eclipse.org/stable (unless these bookmarks are intended for you to test your doc changes). This URL should be running the latest stable release at any given time (i.e. latest Milestone or Release Candidate). Thanks for the info. I indeed mainly used this when testing doc changes, so a manual setup would be good enough for me. However, I tried adding org.eclipse.help.appserver/port=54321 to plugin_customization.ini, but that did not change anything. When I open help in a runtime workbench, AppserverPlugin.startWebappServer() (which I guess is the code that reads out the preference) was never executed. My mistake. That works for appserver still, but appserver is no longer used by help. I'll look at having this documented. Start eclipse like this to control the port: eclipse -vmargs -Dserver_port=<port> Created attachment 70735 [details] Patch Updates the document linked in comment 2 to indicate that those options are deprecated and gives the alternative usage. > eclipse -vmargs -Dserver_port=<port>
Thanks, that's perfect for me, and I've verified that it works in I20070608-1718.
Regarding documentation, I think you should also mention the "-vmargs -Dserver_port=<port>" somewhere else in the help files, not only as an alternative for a deprecated product customization entry. This could either be a separate entry on the "Product customization" page, or (if it applies to all help modes) on the "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide > Programmer's Guide > User assistance support > Help > Configuration/setup" page.
The alternative listed in the document is meant to be a short term solution. I'd like to do one of the following two things to solve this issue: 1. Have the port and host options added back to the plugin_customization.ini file (potentially in org.eclipse.help.base). 2. Have an explicit command line argument created (as opposed to a JVM argument). Currently, when starting in infocenter mode, there are is a "-port <port>" option available. I think this should be changed to something more descriptive and we should allow the same argument when starting the Eclipse launcher. We should revisit this for Eclipse 3.4. The documentation patch has been applied to HEAD, will be in Eclipse 3.3. We are not planning on doing anything else for Eclipse 3.4 - removing target milestone. Markus, can this be closed? Looking at this bug again I don't feel that we need to do anything else at this stage. The "-Dserver_port=<port>" command line argument works for me, but it's still a bit hard to find. If you're not going to add real command line arguments for RCP help, it would be nice if you could add the two system properties to the "Rich Client Platform (RCP) help" page, such that clients can directly see the configuration options for each of the 3 deployment modes (standalone and infocenter both describe the -port and -host command line options). I'll fix the docs for 3.5. The docs have been updated. |