The “Break it Down” Blog

If any of you are working with Eclipse plugins or just starting, here is a gotcha that I ran into that had me completely stumped for a good hour or so.

The Eclipse help system enforces “Best practices”.

Keep that in the back of your head as you work on extensions to org.eclipse.help.toc and wonder why none of your edits are showing up. The reason is the help system, in all it’s glory, silently enforces best-practices like not showing topics if they have an empty href value, or not showing a topic container if it only contains 1 item.

As far as I could tell, this is all done silently, without uttering a single world in the log, console or otherwise. That’s always fun.