Information Center
Infocenter (served) - You can also allow your users to access the help system over the Internet or their intranet, by installing the stand-alone help system and the documentation plug-ins on a web server. The application accesses the documentation by calling a URL, and the help system is shown in their web browser. The infocenter help system can be used both for client applications and for web applications, either of which can have their help accessed remotely. All features except infopops and active help are supported.

Installing steps:

  1. Make sure an application server is installed on the machine.  We have tested with Tomcat 3 and Tomcat 4.
  2. Install (unzip) Eclipse 2.0 driver.  This steps are for 20020411 integration driver or later.  Let us assume Eclipse has been installed to d:\eclipse\.
  3. Register Eclipse Help application residing in d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp with the web server.  Do not copy this directory elsewhere, it must remain in eclipse installation tree.
    In Tomcat this can be accomplished by adding the two lines
    <Context path="/help"  docBase="d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp">
    </Context>
    to the tomcat/conf/server.xml file.  In Tomcat 3 this section can be added near end of the file, as the last element inside the ContextManager section.  In Tomcat 4 this section can be added as the last element inside the Host section.
  4. Install server specific fixes.
    • Tomcat 3:  Tomcat 3 does not have XML parser library available to a web application.  To fix that, copy xerces.jar from d:\eclipse\plugins\org.apache.xerces\ to d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp\WEB-INF\lib\
    • Tomcat 4:  Both Eclipse and Tomcat contain code to set a URLStreamHandler, but it can only be set once.  To allow both Tomcat and Eclipse to work correctly, a library d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp\infocenter\eclipseurl.jar needs to be added to the class path at Tomcat startup.  In Tomcat 4.0.3 edit tomcat/bin/setclasspath.bat file and after a line 
      set CLASSPATH=%JAVA_HOME%\lib\tools.jar
      insert line
      set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp\infocenter\eclipseurl.jar.
    • Disable precompiled JSP's:. Unless you are using Tomcat 4.0.1 or plan to ship the jasper jar files you should also copy d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp\infocenter\web.xml to d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp\WEB-INF.

Using Information center:
Start web server.
Point a web browser to the path of the web application.  On the machine the Tomcat is installed, this would be http://localhost:8080/help/.

Installing custom documentation:
Eclipse comes with its own documentation.  It will be available in the infocenter by default.
To have you own documentation show up, package the documentation as Eclipse plugins.  Install them to d:\eclipse\plugins\.  To remove Eclipse documentation that is in the infocenter default, delete following directories:

  • d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.jdt.doc.isv
  • d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.jdt.doc.user
  • d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.pde.doc.user
  • d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv
  • d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.platform.doc.user.

Customizing infocenter look:
TBD