Bug 33628 [Preferences] provide API for showing a specified preference page
There is no way for a plugin to open the (workbench) preference dialog with a certain peference page selected. Enabling this would allow plugins to refer the user to a certain preference page, for example when a misconfiguration is detected during execution of an action. Also this enables developers to write a new search panel to find a text in the preference pages and get the user right there. A method select(IPreferencePage page), select(IPreferenceNode node) or select(String path) in org.eclipse.jface.preference.PreferenceDialog would help.
bundles/org.eclipse.jface/src/org/eclipse/jface/preference/PreferenceDialog.java
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 * Copyright (c) 2000, 2004 IBM Corporation and others.
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials 
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 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/cpl-v10.html
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 * Contributors:
 *     IBM Corporation - initial API and implementation
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package org.eclipse.jface.preference;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;
import org.eclipse.core.runtime.ISafeRunnable;
import org.eclipse.core.runtime.Platform;