[support-tony]

Before posting, there are a few resources you should be aware of first to see if they can help you with your question or comment.

Firstly, though, please note that full support is only provided for the current and previous GA (general availability) releases. See this FAQ for a little more on this. We can still provide support (but no fixes) for earlier releases but you may be asked for your license details to receive that support.

1. Documentation & FAQ

• Check our Learning Center or help section (or, for releases 10.x and earlier versions, the in-product help]) to see if we already have a guide or tutorial answering your question (Struts, JSF, Database, etc.)
• Quickly skim the FAQ section to see if your question has already been answered

2. Search the Forums
Now, if none of the resources above helped, the next best thing to do is Search the forums. If you feel the results you are getting from a search are too broad, you can try and make them more specific by selecting the “Search for all terms” mode when entering in your search. Note that a search across “All available” forums includes archived forums covering much older topics – just a point to bear in mind.

3. Don’t forget Google
Sometimes it can be hard to determine if a problem is related to MyEclipse, your application server or your computer setup. If you quickly type in your problem into Google, for example “MyEclipse Tomcat ClassNotFoundException”, you can sometimes immediately find help with it, or realize that your problem is something else. This may not help every time, but sometimes can get you the answer you are looking for right away.

4. Tips that may help get you working again
Sometimes, something gets screwed up along the way. Workspace corruption, or project settings, is probably the most common issue (though still rare). Here are some things you can try to get you working again (which is the main objective), even if you decide to post to get a more satisfatory resolution:

• Switch to a new workspace, import the project which is causing problems and see if it now works. (Note that many workspace settings can be exported and imported to a new workspace, via one of the Import wizards.)
• Create a new project and copy across source files from the project causing problems and see if that fixes it.
• Sometimes plug-in caches can get corrupted. Try starting MyEclipse with the clean option.
• If you are not running the latest release, try installing the latest release (it can usually be installed alongside your existing installation) to take advantage of fixes and new features. Your MyEclipse license applies to all releases for as long as the license is valid.
• Very rarely, the MyEclipse installation itself can become corrupted. The installation can be repaired by running the installer again and choosing the repair option. In extreme cases, uninstalling and re-installing may be needed.

5. Posting a Question
OK, so nothing we have suggested so far has helped and you still have a question. We welcome all our users to post their questions and feature requests to the forum. The first step is finding the right forum to post to. This quick guide can help you:

• MyEclipse-related questions/problems go under one of the forums in the MyEclipse IDE section. The section is broken down into a forum for installation questions, General Development questions and several forums for specific development areas such as Java EE development or Spring development with MyEclipse for Spring. Each forum has a, hopefully, self-explanatory name, with some showing a further comment for clarification. Try to look for a specific forum first, before posting in the general development forum. This helps people browsing the forums for resolutions to their issues.
• For feature requests, use the Feature Requests forum. This allows other users to comment, so we can gauge the support for new features.
• For comments on the MyEclipse IDE products (complimentary or otherwise) and general questions about them, use the Comments forum.
• Lastly, there is an Off-Topic forum for general development issues that aren’t related to the IDE. (For example, a question about how to make a list of checkboxes work in Struts, this is not a MyEclipse question, this is a general Struts question). It is hoped that other MyEclipse users will be able to offer help here, though we will also try to respond if we can. For these kind of off-topic questions, though, we recommend external forums that may be specific to the technology causing problems or forums that are more general and attract a wide range of knowledgeable people (such as stackoverflow.com).

After you have determined the specific forum to post to and are ready to create a new post, please remember that the only thing we know about your bug is what you tell us. If you say “I’m clicking on the button and it’s not working!”, it’s impossible for us to help. What button are you clicking? How is it failing? Is there a popup? A log entry? An error dialog?

4a. Posting the Right Information, Part 1
We have tried to make posting the right information easy for you. It is best if you start a problem report by giving us your system information, you can get that from going to the MyEclipse menu at the top of your MyEclipse window, clicking it, then go down to “Installation Summary” and select that:

NOTE: Previous to MyEclipse 5.0, this was called “About MyEclipse”, so if you are using a version of MyEclipse prior to 5.0, please adjust the instructions according to what you are seeing.

Now the MyEclipse dialog will popup, from there, click the “Installation Details” button:

NOTE: Previous to MyEclipse 5.0, this was called “Configuration Summary”, so if you are using a version of MyEclipse prior to 5.0, please adjust the instructions according to what you are seeing.

Then after your system details popup, please click the “Copy to Clipboard” button:

After doing that you can paste that information into your post so we know what your system setup is.

4b. Posting the Right Information, Part 2
Now that we have your system information, we need a good description of the problem. Please be sure to tell us exactly what is happening, do not simply say “It’s broken”. Please explain what is happening, maybe a popup dialog is comming up? Maybe an error is getting written to your log file?

Normally errors being written to your log file are important for us to see. Your log file is located at:
<workspace directory>\.metadata\.log

and is created in an appended fashion, so your newest errors will be at the bottom.

TIP: To make it easy to track down a problem that is writing errors to your log, the easiest thing to do is shut down MyEclipse, erase your old log file, restart MyEclipse, perform just the action that causes the problem, then attach the log file to your new message posting (to attach files, use the “Add an Attachment” section below the main post entry section; browse for a file, add a comment and click the “Add Attachment” button – you may need to rename your file, click the Allowed Extensions link to see what file extensions you can attach), that way it will be small and concise and only show us the problem we are concerned with.

After you have posted your system information, a good description of what is going on, any recent changes you may have made to your system or to MyEclipse, and your log file, if necessary, you are all ready to make your post. Once you have done that, someone should get back to you very quickly, often within a few hours but within one working day. This can include official support personnel for MyEclipse, MyEclipse developers or our user base that knows more than we could ever know.

5. End of the Road
If you’ve read this far then you feel that the forums are not the right place for your issue. You can also reach us at the following email addresses depending on what the question pertains to:

• Anything related to your subscription: [email protected]
• Anything related to a technical problem with MyEclipse: [email protected]

Response times are generally similar to what you would get with the forums. Please understand that if your question is a general question that more users can benefit from, we may direct you to post to the forums as to create a public/searchable record of the question and answer. However, if your question is a very specific or private question that needs to be addressed please drop us an email and we will take care of you as soon as we can.

Thank You
The MyEclipse team wants to thank you for your support as a user and hope our product helps you and/or your company. We know you have a lot of choices in IDEs and we appreciate your choosing us. We will work hard to keep your business.

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