I'm developing a a pure Eclipse E4Application and got a task to support Help System (org.eclipse.help plugin). But when I'm adding it to e4 application it failed to start stating that it has to app id.
!ENTRY org.eclipse.equinox.app 0 0 2012-08-24 22:56:44.744
!MESSAGE Product com.studio.product could not be found.
!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 0 2012-08-24 22:56:44.794
!MESSAGE One or more bundles are not resolved because the following root constraints are not resolved:
!SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.osgi 2 0 2012-08-24 22:56:44.795
!MESSAGE Bundle initial@reference:file:workspace/com.studio/ was not resolved.
!SUBENTRY 2 com.studio 2 0 2012-08-24 22:56:44.795
!MESSAGE Missing required bundle org.eclipse.help.ui_3.5.200.
This is because org.eclipse.help.ui is not native e4 plugin. What are the ways to integrate? I've review different tutorials and articles but can't make this work. Only way I found is https://github.com/fredrikattebrant/Simple-4x-RCP-app this example mentioned by Lars Vogel, but seems this a bit different, the UI is defined in an old fashion by WorkbenchAdvison, WindowAdvisor and so on. I do need a pure e4 with help support.
Seems that pure Eclipse 4 code currently (as in Eclipse juno 4.2) lacks support for help, or a preference GUI.
If you want to use help or preferences, especially when you want to extend these via plugins, the Eclipse 3 compatibility layer appears to be the only way to go, but then there's no way to add Eclipse 4 plugins to such a compatibility-layer-based E3 app (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=376486).
If you want to add help to a pure E4 app, you could of course add a "Help" menu to your app via the E4 model, and your command handler then opens a part which basically contains an SWT browser widget for displaying the help. Doesn't compare to the pluggable E3 help with index, search etc.