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
import org.eclipse.swt.events.HelpListener;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.SelectionAdapter;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.SelectionEvent;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.ShellAdapter;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.ShellEvent;
import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Font;
import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Point;
import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Rectangle;
import org.eclipse.swt.layout.FormAttachment;
import org.eclipse.swt.layout.FormData;
import org.eclipse.swt.layout.FormLayout;
import org.eclipse.swt.layout.GridData;
import org.eclipse.swt.layout.GridLayout;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Button;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Control;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Event;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Label;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Layout;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Listener;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Sash;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Tree;
/**
 * A preference dialog is a hierarchical presentation of preference pages. Each
 * page is represented by a node in the tree shown on the left hand side of the
 * dialog; when a node is selected, the corresponding page is shown on the right
 * hand side.
 */
public class PreferenceDialog extends TrayDialog implements IPreferencePageContainer, IPageChangeProvider {