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1. Open the Help viewer and minimize it (i think this happens even if it's not minimized, just open and in the background somewhere). 2. Open any modal dialog. The dialog resizes and the Help viewer gets out of the way, but the Help viewer stays fronted and retains the focus. Especially annoying since there's no keyboard shortcut for fronting the modal dialog.
Keyboard shortcuts for fronting a modal dialog will vary by platform, that is for you and your window manager to work out. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 14393 ***
I'm not convinced that this is a duplicate of 14393. This issue *only* concerns the fact that when the help viewer resizes and gets out of the way of a modal dialog, it retains the focus so you have to click the dialog to be able to enter any information. The keyboard shortcut bit was only an aside. I didn't see this mentioned on 14393. Will this behavior be fixed in the fix for 14393?
OK, if it's not dependent on minimizing the dialog. Again: decent window managers make it trivial to change focus between windows, clicking is not necessarily required. I don't expect #14393 to be fixed anytime in the foreseeable future. As far as I know it is blocked by a Java bug which does not look like it will be fixed anytime soon.
*** Issue 21958 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Jesse, Is there any way to detect if the user has minimized the JavaHelp window and leave it minimized? If the user is doing a tutorial, they are less likely to minimize the JavaHelp window, and they'll want to be able to see it. If they aren't doing a tutorial, the first time the help window pops up unexpectedly, they're likely to minimize it. If it then continues to pop up every time they open a new window, the behavior of the JavaHelp window becomes an annoying hindrance. It would be nice if the user could minimize the help window and see it only when they choose to.
Paul, please read issue #14393.
Raising priority because this is an a11y issue. AFAIK there is no way to switch between the Help window and the modal dialog using keyboard. Help window gets tied to modal dialog and thus doesn't show up in the window manager as its own window. Therefore you can't use the window manager to switch between the two. At least that's how it works in Windows.
On Sawfish (Linux) you can give some kind of focus to the dialog using the KB - at least highlight the window title - but it seems that KB focus stays in the help window, making it impossible to type in the dialog, though you can interact with it using the mouse. This is true even when the help window was fronted when the dialog was opened, i.e. not specific to minimization. It is not true if the help window was opened after the dialog was already open. I'm not sure if this is fixable, seems to be at the mercy of the JRE's interaction with the native window system, but can try various tricks to see if anything works. I will repeat my perennial request for nearly all dialogs in NetBeans to be made nonmodal, which would solve this along with a dozen other problems.
Gail, cc'ing you since this bug poses accessibility problems
An amendment to my last statement about losing KB focus in the original dialog: this only seems to happen, perversely, if you Alt-TAB to raise the original dialog! (In which case orig is raised but the help dialog keeps KB focus.) If you just move the mouse into it to raise it (sloppy focus), then it gets KB focus fine. Still an A11Y problem. I have been trying various AWT window focus calls at random but *nothing* I can find will programmtically raise the original dialog or give it KB focus after the JavaHelp nonmodal dialog is opened, at least on my Linux system. This is true even in a dummy test program that simulates the important aspects of JavaHelp display: opening the modal dialog then opening the nonmodal help dialog on top of it. So I still see no solution.
Can't get it to front the original modal dialog under JDK 1.4 on Linux. Found out that under JDK 1.3.1 on Linux, what I said about KB focus is not true: Alt-TAB works fine to switch back to the original modal dialog and give it KB focus. Since the exact behavior seems to be platform-dependent, I doubt any single fix is going to work for everyone.
reopening and reassinging to richard gregor to take another look.
You're as likely to work on these as I am not, I guess. I have no time for core/javahelp development. Maybe you will at some point.
Jesse, you mention you wrote a standalone app that mimics the help window's behavior to try and fix this. If you've still got it, could you attach it?
I have tried experiments of opening a modal dialog with the help closed, the help open, and the help open and minimized. I am trying to find some sort of pattern as to when the help window is fronted when a modal dialog is opened. Sometimes the help window is fronted, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the help window is closed when the modal dialog is closed and sometimes not. One very irritating situation is when I have the help open and I am following the steps in the help topic. During one of the steps, I get an error dialog, which repositions the help window. When I close the error dialog, the help window is closed. I now have to reopen the help and navigate my way to the topic I was reading before the IDE so rudely closed it and lost my place. At a minimum, there should be some consistency as to what happens with the help when a modal dialog opens and closes. IMHO the help window should not be fronted/repositioned when a modal dialog opens unless the user clicks the help button on the modal dialog. If the help was already open when the user clicked Help, the help window must not be closed when the modal dialog closes.
A counter-example: a user is following a procedural help topic that involves the filling in of a few fields in a modal dialog, closing the dialog, and doing something else. In that case, the repositioning is helpful. I'm not sure that's the case we want to optimize for, but it has to be taken into account.
I just got confirmation that the JDK team has committed to fix this issue in 1.5 beta, so I am closing this issue as INVALID (not because it's not real, but because it's not in NetBeans code).
Tim, could you provide more details on what the fix will be and a JDK issue number?
Ugh, sorry to get your hopes up - I closed the wrong issue. I meant to close the one about tooltips fronting the main window. Ignore my previous commens.
Reassigning to Marek, new owner of output window and help system
fixed for jdk 1.5.0_03/_04 and later
verified in NB4.1(200501241900)