Missing basic JavaDoc in Eclipse

Question

Up to a few days ago, Eclipse was working fine in locating the javadoc for base classes such as Java.io.File. Recently, though, hovering over these classes only yields a message

Answer 1

I encountered this problem now a couple of times too. It's especially annoying if you have a lot of projects in your workspace and you don't want to set the javadoc locations for each project.

Referencing the online documentation works well indeed, and there is a way to do that globally for all Java libraries:

• Go to: Window -> Preferences
• Expand: Java -> Installed JREs
• Select your default Java installation
• Press ''Edit''
• Select all the JRE system libraries
• Press ''Javadoc Location...''
• In the Javadoc location path put in the path to the online documentation. For Java 8 for example this is http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/. (If you press ''Validate...'' it will tell you if it is a valid javadoc location.)
• Press ''OK'', then ''Finish'', then ''OK''

And here you have some images:

And your basic Java javadoc is ready to go.