Missing Help

[RadekCap]

I've found that Contextual Help on the toolbar isn't working. By exploring actions from the Help menu I've found:

1 Help/Contextual help Not working

2 Help/Keyboard Shortcuts Card => Throwin Warning: File "shortcuts.pdf" does not exist or is not a plain file.

3 Help/Report issue https://netbeans.apache.org/participate/report-issue.html

My suggestions for what to do: 1 Implement proper action binding etc., bind action on the Toolbar as well 2 In the latest release tr it's hidden so probably we should hide it. 3 The same as 2 and I would add it as a "nice to have" feature to allow users to report directly to us from the application

[ursjoss]

This is a little more tricky than expected. It seems that with the donation of Netbeans from Oracle to Apache (as of Version 9), the support for JavaHelp (the underlaying app for help display) was dropped due to licensing issues (some references). All references/tutorial/mentions of using JavaHelp in Netbeans are for ancient versions of netbeans. Yet, current version NetBeans-16 still offers the assistant to integrate JavaHelp.

I tried different leads (depending on NetBeans JavaHelp Integration), even to pull in javahelp 2.0.05 (from 2010!) in as an explicit dependency (maven central), but so far I couldn't get it to work).

The underlying problem is that Lookup doesn't provide the help class why HelpCSAction will simply silently return. Here a screenshot, adding a log for debug purposes:

I am putting this issue back on the backlog. We may find more leads when going through and resolving warnings and errors we find in the logs.