#10 JADE online help doesn't work with Adobe Reader X

[Jade Support]

This Jade Source bulletin applies to any developer who:

• Uses the F1 keyboard shortcut from within the JADE IDE to display the online help for the item with input focus
• Uses PDF documents as their application help files

Description:
After upgrading to Acrobat Reader X the F1 keyboard shortcut will no longer display the PDF help document. This may be from within the JADE IDE, or from your own user application where the Help File set in the Application Definition is a PDF.

In Acrobat X, Adobe have changed the name of the DDE server (JADE uses the DDE to communicate with Acrobat Reader as documented by Adobe), this means that requests using the old server name will fail.

If this occurs when using the F1 keyboard shortcut in JADE a message will be logged to the JADE activity log, e.g.

JomLog: DdeConnect communication with the acrobat reader failed, DDE Error 0x400a

This is further detailed in the following forum posting; http://forums.adobe.com/message/3323076. In particular starting at entry #10 where a PDF architect describes the change and plans for future changes.

Online help from within the JADE IDE or your user application won't work with Acrobat Reader X for JADE releases prior to 6.3.08.

Solution:
If you utilise the F1 online help feature in JADE we recommend not upgrading to Acrobat Reader X until the related JADE environment is on 6.3.08. JADE 6.3.08 will be released at the end of February 2011.