Eclipse RCP - usage of help subsystem

Question

I am developing an RCP application following the e4 development model. My application is made of

1. the plugin project itself containing: the plugin.xml, application.e4xmi and required resources

2. the product project with the .product descriptor

My need is to access the PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getHelpSystem() in order to provide Help features to users. When trying to create the Workbench itself with

PlatformUI.createAndRunWorkbench(...)

I get very low level errors like:

org.eclipse.e4.ui.model.application.descriptor.basic.impl.PartDescriptorImpl
cannot be cast to
org.eclipse.e4.ui.model.application.ui.MUIElement

Searching the web I have found little results on this same matter. I am under the impression that an application-based product cannot access Workbench services like the Help system, unless it is re-designed to be a Workbench based application.

Can anyone please shed some light on how to access the workbench from a stripped-down RCP application?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can't access anything in PlatformUI from a pure Eclipse 4 application.

There is a bit of discussion in this link http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/t/207285/ but there doesn't seem to be a way to use the help system.