Five Things You Didn't Know About Eclipse Infocenter

Well, maybe you knew them already. Maybe you didn't. Either way, Holger Voormann has an interesting series on his blog, Eclipse Howl, about some nifty info regarding the Eclipse Infocenter. Here's a quick review:

Basic VS. Bot


First, Voormann talks about the difference between Eclipse Center's different modes. The basic mode is mainly created for legacy browsers, but Voormann points out some additional uses for it. The bot mode, on the other hand, is "used to present the website without HTML frames to web crawlers," making topics in the Infocenter more easily searchable.

Link Deep

The next topic Voormann discusses is deep linking in the Eclipse Infocenter. And it turns out there is no deep linking in Eclipse Infocenter.

The Infocenter does not yet support deep linking: When you browse inside the Infocenter the URL does not change. If you want to bookmark a topic you will have to copy the topic link via right-click menu from the table of contents, paste the link into the address bar and bookmark this URL.

Still, Voormann goes over some helpful tips for navigating links in Infocenter, including removing frames and highlighting text.

Search Links


Here Voormann describes using search links, which "re queries which can be used for sharing or creating a search input field in or outside the Infocenter." He explains that these links can be used to search all content, a specific book, or even a specific chapter, based on the parameters used. There are some other helpful parameters listed, too.

Changing the Language

In his next post, Voormann goes over changing the language of the Infocenter, going over which parameters to append for which languages.

The Infocenter is multilingual. The Eclipse Babel project provides languages packs for the user interface. When the content is available in different languages it depends on your web browser settings which language will be chosen. The language setting of your web browser can be overruled by appending ?lang=… to the URL.

Finding Debugging Info

Finally, Voormann talks about finding debugging information, including finding information about active plugins and security risks.

...in situations when you cannot easily access the server on which the Infocenter is running you can still get hold of a list of active plug-ins and some help-specific configuration information. Furthermore, you can display any file of an active plug-in. This debugging information, which is similar to the Configuration Details in the About Dialog of your Eclipse IDE, can be accessed not by following a link or by clicking a button but by opening specific URLs.

So there you go - some handy info on the Eclipse Infocenter. Check out Voormann's blog for the whole series, and for more Eclipse goodies.