Help tool contents (html) should be overridden easier
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Matthew Jones October 23, 2012 at 3:56 PM
I'm pretty sure all of help trunk committed prior to July including these changes got included in the merge for https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-22288#icft=SAK-22288 in 110562. I didn't verify this though.
Steve Swinsburg October 23, 2012 at 3:41 PM
Yeah thats fine. I thought it was 2.10 only though since I dont see any 2.9 merges? Or was it just before the 2.9 branch was cut?
Matthew Jones October 23, 2012 at 3:22 PM
Hi Steve, these are good suggestions, but I'm going to close this issue back up again and open new tickets since this is already in 2.9 b07 and other places as noted by the merge logs. So it would be confusing if new changes were made against this ticket.
Steve Swinsburg October 22, 2012 at 5:30 PMEdited
It's confusing that the syntax of this needs to be /help/ when it really is $sakai.home}/help/ - Other properties that are in that location actually need the ${sakai.home} in them e.g.
storagePath@org.sakaiproject.archive.api.ArchiveService = ${sakai.home}/archive/
url@javax.sql.BaseDataSource=jdbc:hsqldb:file:${sakai.home}db/sakai.db
samigo.answerUploadRepositoryPath=${sakai.home}/samigo/answerUploadRepositoryPath/
Also, the format /help/ generally means a directory at the root of a filesystem.
Finally, due to the way it has been implemented, there is no way to move the help outside of the sakai home directory, since it is explicitly prefixed to it:
String localHelpPath = sakaiHomePath+serverConfigurationService.getString("help.localpath","/help/");
Could this be changed to require the property to be the full path so that people can override it, e.g. ${sakai.home}/help/ ?
I'm going to reopen this so that it be be discussed.
Steve Swinsburg October 22, 2012 at 5:20 PM
FYI commit r103361 is missing a number of semicolons around the if/else statements that make things clearer.
The help tool contents (help documents) are stored in jar files in shared/lib. If someone wants to modify the contents of these they have to either repackage the jars or rebuild the tools help files. It would be nice if the help tool would check for modifications to individual files from a local path something like:
ServerConfigurationService.getSakaiHomePath() + "/help/"+help.location
Ideally a new registration could also be provided here would could override all of it, but this would satisfy a lot of customization that we have that are just minor text changes without actually adding/removing help documents.