Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 350042

Summary:	[Help] The standalone help "displayHelpWindow" does not terminate when no embedded browser is available
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Martin Oberhuber <mober.at+eclipse>
Component:	User Assistance	Assignee:	platform-ua-inbox <platform-ua-inbox>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3	CC:	aeurielesn, cgold, chris, gloria.s.goyena, mark.melvin, martin.gutschelhofer, mober.at+eclipse, todd_lee
Version:	3.7
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:	stalebug
Bug Depends on:	57331
Bug Blocks:

Description Martin Oberhuber

2011-06-22 08:36:13 EDT

Build ID: 3.7 final (I20110613-1736)

The new standalone help command "displayHelpWindow" which was introduced in 3.7 through bug 57331 automatically falls back to showing help in the System Browser, when no embedded browser is available.

That fallback makes great sense for end users, whose main goal is actually seeing the help. The drawback, though, is that the original command does not terminate since no embedded browser window sends the shutdown.

This is easy to reproduce on Linux, by disabling xulrunner explicitly:

   java -cp plugins/org.eclipse.help.base_3.6.0.v201106131736.jar \
      org.eclipse.help.standalone.Help -command displayHelpWindow \
      -vmargs -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=none

Not shutting down the driver is OK when the driver is executed from commandline; it's a problem though when the driver is executed from an icon of some sort, since the driver would keep running in background and never terminate.

I'm wondering if there's any smart idea to address this issue?

Not having an embedded browser is, unfortunately, still relatively common for our end users. Though we do want to design for the majority of users who do have one.

Comment 1 Martin Oberhuber

2011-06-22 08:38:24 EDT

CQ:WIND00267022

Perhaps the Help Infocenter could embed some Javascript that gets executed on a "close window" event, and that Javascript could initiate a HEAD/GET request on some URL which instructs the help server to send the shutdown...

Comment 2 Martin Oberhuber

2011-06-22 08:42:27 EDT

FWIW, I noticed that initiating the stanadlone help -displayHelpWindow a _second_ time while the first is still running just opens a new tab in the Browser and terminates immediately.

So it looks like as long as both invocations share the same Workspace, we know for sure that only ONE help server is running at any one time.

Having that ONE help server seems acceptable to me, and may actually be exactly the behavior that we want...

Comment 3 Lars Vogel

2019-11-14 03:33:32 EST

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

If the bug is still relevant, please remove the "stalebug" whiteboard tag.