Bug 244284 [Preferences] Preference page help is not shown when tree is selected
In the Preferences dialog, some pages don't have a help context associated with them. On these pages, the behavior of the help button/F1 key is inconsistent: the help tray is shown if a widget on the respective page is shown, but _not_ if the tree item is selected. Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. Open the Preferences dialog 2. Select the tree item "Tasks" 3. Press F1 (or press the help button in the lower left corner) -> no help is shown 4. Select any widget on the Tasks page 5. Press F1 -> the help tray is shown Root cause analysis: As far as I could find out, the reason for this inconsistent behavior lies in the method org.eclipse.jface.preference.PreferencePage.performHelp(), which is triggered in step 3. This method assumes, that the preference page's top level control has a help listener attached to it. This is true for many other preference pages [see for example org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.preferences.JavaBasePreferencePage.createControl(Composite)], but not for the Task preference page [sorry, couldn't find its source code]. So why does step 5 still show the help tray? That step triggers org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.TrayDialog.helpPressed() which searches the widget hierarchy for a help listener, and will always find one on the dialog level. I suggest to chage PreferencePage.performHelp() so that it behaves like TrayDialog.helpPressed(), for example by copying the recursive search for help handlers.
bundles/org.eclipse.jface/src/org/eclipse/jface/preference/PreferenceDialog.java
scrolled.setLayoutData(scrolledData);
		
		Composite result = new Composite(scrolled, SWT.NONE);
		
		GridData resultData = new GridData(GridData.FILL_BOTH | GridData.GRAB_HORIZONTAL
				| GridData.GRAB_VERTICAL);
				
		result.setLayout(getPageLayout());
		result.setLayoutData(resultData);
		
		scrolled.setContent(result);
		
		return result;
	}
	/**
	 * Return the layout for the composite that contains
	 * the pages.
	 * @return PageLayout
	 * 
	 * @since 3.1
	 */
	protected Layout getPageLayout() {
		return new PageLayout();
	}
	/**
	 * Creates the wizard's title area.
	 * 
	 * @param parent
	 *            the SWT parent for the title area composite.