{JDK 1.3-S}

Try to repeat this:


1) Click on a caption (title bar) of some IDE window. And then press F1.
2) Sometimes appears message "Sorry, this feature has no specific help..." (and sometimes not).

[jglick] You must hold the mouse *over* a feature with help. IDE windows themselves have no help. Ideally a window would have help gotten from the component within it, but this is not possible without
 some big changes to how help works. I defer such things since they would be better to do properly with a future version of JavaHelp (the current version does not provide certain features which I woul
d need for this, and I do not want to do something too different from how JavaHelp normally works).

The UG does say that you should hold the mouse over the feature. If you do this, the help should work.

Tech: any help on the window would need to be on the JFrame (or rather its root pane, pending client properties on non-JComponent components). Window manager impl could easily set such a help ID on th
e root pane whenever the window is selected or tab changes, taking it from the selected top component. However, there is no firing of change of help context from the top component (nor should there be
, this would be way too much overhead in the case of Explorer components). Also, nobody should ask for a helpctx unless it is really needed, as in some cases (instance cookies) there is overhead in ge
tting it. So this is out. HelpCtx.findHelp looks for help dynamically on top components, because these are in API, but window manager frames are not, so this cannot work. Desired impl is to have clien
t property giving a "help provider" which dynamically finds the correct help--then both top components and WM frames will have this and compute help on the fly. I have suggested this to JavaHelp team,
 if it gets done then IDE will support & use it. Currently only static help ID associations are defined by JavaHelp.