Little Known Things about the Eclipse Infocenter: Deep Linking (2/5)

{editor's note: we posted a summary of holger voormann's tips about the eclipse infocenter a few weeks ago . we are now excited to have holger as a dzone mvb, and will be publishing his full infocenter articles this week. make sure to check out holger's blog, eclipse howl .}

the eclipse infocenter is the eclipse help system launched as a stand-alone web application. five well-hidden features about the infocenter will be presented one after the other here. basic and bot mode have already been presented and here comes the second little known thing: deep linking.

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.

vmware has already implemented deep linking without contributing it back to eclipse. this is not the only adaption vmware made. unfortunately, one of these additional adaptions does not work with internet explorer 8 (in contrast to firefox, google chrome and internet explorer 11), so that the table of contents does not show up. there are no such problems with the plain eclipse infocenter. this is why contributing back makes sense. ;-)

however, deep linking has not yet been implemented in the plain eclipse infocenter and you have to copy manually the link from the table of contents. this link is redirected to the version with html frames. if you want to see the topic framelessly without the table of contents, search field, etc. you will have to append ?noframes=true to the link. alternatively, in the url you could replace /topic/ with / nf topic/ or – if you want to have the navigation breadcrumb at the top – with / n topic/ .

with the resultof parameter you can highlight text. the topic is automatically scrolled to the first hit. this can be used to link to a specific section inside a topic. for example, if you want to link to the “dark theme” inside the “what’s new in luna” topic you will have to append ?resultof=”dark theme” to the link. the phrase to be highlighted has to be enclosed in parentheses. two or more phrases have to be concatenated without delimiters as you can see in the following example:

to combine both frames and highlighting is a little bit tricky. first you have to open the topic link which redirects you to index.jsp?topic=… ; then you have to append ?resultof=… to the redirected url. the ? topic=… ? resultof=… instead of ? topic=… & resultof=… is probably a work-a-round for an error waiting to be fixed. ;-)

the next little known things about the eclipse infocenter on my list are search links , language switching and debugging information . stay tuned!