Community
Participate
Working Groups
Platforms: Solaris 9 and HP-UX11.11 Eclipse 3.0M8, Build Id: 200403261517 First I will prove that I can open the web browser via Eclipse Help: - Go to Window->Preferences->Help. Enter in the browser's path and command (e.g <path>/netscape %1) into "Customer Browser command". Click OK. - Go to Help->Help Contents. The browser opens with Eclipse Help System content. The browser is working O.K. I now go to Help again: - Help->About Eclipse Platform->Feature Details. Select an item and click 'More Info'. An error dialog box comes up with an "Unable to open web browser" message. Same with Help->About Eclipse Platform->Plug-in Details Is there any place on Eclipse that I can set the 'More Info' web browser preference?
Tod, This is not a help issue. Help works for Brian. It is Help->About that has a problem opening a browser. I think the code for this in UI component. Moving back to UI.
Some more info for you: If I put netscape in my path instead of go to Window->Preferences->Help to specify the full path for netscape, the 'More Info" will work. Looks like the 'More Info' does not use Help Preference. If you are not planning to fix it, can you at least put it in the release note. Thanks.
I looked into the code for this. ProductInfoDialog currently guesses at netscape, then tries mozilla, then gives up. No path information is used. This should be changed to use the help preference as described in comment 2.
Also exists in Eclipse 3.0 Release (Build id: 200406251208) on Solaris 9. Even though this has been a known issue since 2004-04-16, it is not mentioned in the release notes of Eclipse 3.0 Build.
The problem is that the About dialog is making guesses at a valid browser on the user's system. On windows this seems to work very well since IE gets picked and works. There doesn't seem to be a problem on MAC either since /usr/bin/open seems to be a well-known app. The problem comes on other platforms where the about dialog tries netscape, then mozilla, then gives up. The original plan to fix the about dialog was to look for the help preference that's mentioned in the original bug description. After more investigation I see that help has put alot of work into browser management (the BrowserManager and releated classes). I would like to use these classes (the about dialog is accessed from the Help menu so I think it makes sense from a user's point of view too). However, they're currently internal and are declared in org.eclipse.help.base. Konrad, is there any chance that the browser management can be made available somehow?
Yes. I see ... HTML viewer/browser support in the UI and available to all components. This can be just using the code currently residing in help or better. There is more discussion in bug 69647 (and related).
*** Bug 73274 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Should switch to using new browser support. Dejan, would you like to help out with this one?
Yes, I will attach a patch that moves 'About' to the browser support.
Great, thanks.
Dejan, will it work the same as before if o.e.ui.browser is not installed (i.e. for RCP apps)? That is, is the default behaviour to open the external browser appropriate for the system? Should test with the browser example (o.e.ui.examples.rcp.browser).
Created attachment 19648 [details] About dialog moved to the workbench browser support
It will - in fact the code for the fallback browser support is a direct copy from AboutDialog.
Dejan, with this patch I get an error dialog due to a MalformedURLException when I do: Help > About > Configuration Details > View Error Log. It's trying to construct a URL with "d:\eclipse-new\empty-workspace2\.metadata\.log".
I've fixed this by changing AboutSystemDialog.openErrorLogBrowser to do: openLink("file:///" + filename); //$NON-NLS-1$ instead of openLink(filename); I don't think the other callers of openLink will pass a file name.
Patch applied. Also improved the error handling to give more details about the URL attempted, and the exception that occurred.
