Help center only works when online

[nina-roth]

The Help Center of the GUI version only shows the index, but no text (see attached screenshot).

When I click on a question mark in the GUI, the help center jumps to the corresponding section, but it is always empty. I've not seen any error messages.

I found the docs on the website but it would be nicer to have them available offline as well :)

System: Win7 Enterprise Service Pack 1 Arx Version 3.7.0 (installed from Windows binary)

[prasser]

Dear Nina,

thanks for your interest in ARX!

The help center of ARX retrieves its content dynamically from the internet. It will only work when you are online. It would be great, however, if ARX would display a message when the help pages could not be retrieved. This would be a great enhancement, so I will leave this issue open for now.

Best Fabian

[nina-roth]

Thanks for your reply! I am online, but behind a corporate firewall -- maybe that's the issue? I've had to add proxy-settings for other programs before.

[prasser]

Maybe... I am also running ARX 3.7.0 on Windows 7 and the help center works as expected.

[nina-roth]

FYI, I was able to access the documentation outside the corporate network. So in my case the problem is due to not being able to set proxy settings in ARX. Another future enhancement, mabye? ;-)

Cheers, Nina

[prasser]

ARX is open source software! Feel free to create a pull request! ;) Best, Fabian

[nartz]

I've dealt with this issue before, but unfortunately it depends on the proxy setup. A quick hack that might work is, when starting ARX, start it with the -Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true; another way to set this is to change the net.properties file to true:

https://github.com/arx-deidentifier/arx-installer/blob/master/jre1.8.0_91/java-windows-x64/lib/net.properties#L18

which is a bit more reliable.

For corporate networks, this is hit or miss (mostly miss from some experience).

The user might be able just to edit the net.properties file themselves setting like http.proxyHost and http.proxyPort etc, however, most corporate networks might use proxy authentication of some sort (for windows maybe NTLM), and they would also have to set up authentication. (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/net/proxies.html)

Maybe an option for this would be to generate the html and stuff it in the installer to access the html files locally with a build.