Starting Help outside the IDE
One of the great new improvements in the latest JBuilder 3 version is the possibility of seeing the Help in the taskbar (see JBuilder info).
But we still have to first start JBuilder and then start the Help.
Or as we have seen at last week's tip the Help system doesn't work anymore, because we have performed unsupported actions.
It would be nice if we could start the Help without starting JBuilder, for example to quickly search on a topic.
The Help system in JBuilder 3 is completely written in Java and therefore we can start outside the IDE by simply invoking the right classes.
All JBuilder IDE Java classes can be found in the files jbuilder.zip, jbuilder-res.zip and jbuilder-util.zip in the lib folder of the JBuilder 3 folder.
So all we have to do is to include these zip files in our class path and invoke the correct class with the right arguments.
The following batch file will do the trick:
@echo off
REM Set path to JBuilder 3 folder
set jb3=c:\jbuilder3\
REM Build up class path
set help_cp=%jb3%lib\jbuilder.zip;%jb3%lib\jbuilder-res.zip
set help_cp=%help_cp%;%jb3%lib\jbuilder-util.zip;%jb3%lib\jbuilderdt.jar
set help_cp=%help_cp%;%jb3%lib\dx3.0.jar;%jb3%lib\dx3.0-res.jar
REM Invoke the JVM from the JBuilder 3 installation (should be on one line)
%jb3%java\jre\bin\javaw -cp %help_cp%
com.borland.jbuilder.help.ViewerFrame %jb3%doc\ jbuilder qs/shortcuts.html
REM Clear variables
set jb3=
set help_cp=
The class path is extended with the necessary complimentary JAR files the Help system needs by using the -cp argument.
(The building of the class path is done using three lines because of HTML formatting reasons for this document)
We can now run the batch file and the Help system will start without JBuilder 3 running.
