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Build ID: 3.7 (Indigo) The standalone help application does evaluate enablement expressions in the TOC - but the context in which these are evaluated doesn't support plugin activation. As a result, any user-contributed property testers are never loaded and respective expressions are unusable. This is a major problem for us since we've added a fair bit of enablement expressions into our documentation. Which works perfectly fine when used from the IDE (plugins are activated already from the IDE when help kicks in), as well as in infocenter mode (no enablement conditions used at all). We'd now like to support standalone help using the new "displayHelpWindow" command, but it's unusable for us since most of our docs are always hidden due to this force activation / enablement defect.
Created attachment 201267 [details] patch v1 Attached 2-line patch fixes the issue, by allowing plugin activation in the evaluation context used by standalone help. I can't see how this would cause any issues since enablement expressions need to explicitly request plugin activation - denying this request doesn't make sense. It was necessary to fix both the UI and non-UI help context since there's a very short time at startup where the non-UI context is active before the UI one kicks in. I wanted to allow plugin activation in both contexts to avoid race conditions where an expression would happen to be evaluated early. Please consider this patch for 3.7.1 - it's really critical for our product.
Targeting 3.7.1
+1 for inclusion in 3.7.1. I also cannot see any reason why the patch would cause problems.
Patch committed to HEAD with copyright year and contributors updated in comments.
Patch committed to 3.7 maintenance stream with copyright year and contributors updated in comments. Fixed
The fix is in M20110824-0800 - please verify the fix.
CQ:WIND00292491
