Kedar Mhaswade's Blog: NetBeans Open Project Dialog Woes ...

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NetBeans Open Project Dialog Woes ...

Posted by km on April 20, 2007 at 11:40 PM | Comments (5)

I use NetBeans. I like it. I encourage people to use it.

But I am not happy about their handling of "Open Project ..." Dialog. I have checked both NetBeans 5.5.1 RC1 and NetBeans 6.0 daily downloads.

The dialog looks like this (click to enlarge).

I have seen several developers double-click a project folder expecting it to just open the project and finding that it just opens the folder because this widget is just a file chooser!

I mean it understands that the folder is a NetBeans Project Folder, but behaves like a normal folder. So, the only way to open the project is to click the "Open Project Folder" button. This is even worse when you have already double-clicked the folder, because you will have to go to the parent folder and then click the button.

Agreed, that there could be project folders inside project folders (and this is sort of (premature) optimization of using a simple File Chooser to do dual job), but that's a relatively rare case and I think it should certainly be discouraged or made hard to deal with. Instead of that we are making the usual case more difficult to deal with -- double clicking a Project Folder should just open the project in IDE, not open the folder.

Do you find it difficult too (i.e. if you use NetBeans Projects)?

You can suggest a work-around, but it needs to be intuitive enough.

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Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment

Yep, really annoys me too.

Better would be a simple spotlight plugin shipped with Netbeans for the Mac (you seem to be using a Mac) that lets you find all projects instantly, so you just choose one.

Posted by: goron on April 21, 2007 at 12:47 AM

Hi,

I don't agree. Having project folders in project folders is not a rare case. I appreciate the dialog how it is. Look at the maven style artefacts paradigm. It's best practice to have artifacts having their own sub artifacts sorted in a hierarchical style (folders and subfolders).
By the way, I use the Maven2 plugin (mevenide2) for Netbeans and like to "double click" several times a day.

Thanx
Klaus

Posted by: klausstake on April 21, 2007 at 01:12 AM

Hi goron,
spotlight plugin would be useful for Mac users. But what about Windoze?

Posted by: km on April 21, 2007 at 04:41 AM

Hi klausstake,
"rare" is relative. I have seen more developers (including myself) stumble on this rather than having a structure where project folders are inside other project folders.

I don't want to get into GUI rules, but double-clicking seems to be a user's natural way of expressing "open the (damn) project".

Also, my point is when this feature was being designed, did the NetBeans designers do a survey of which kind of users would be more in number? I just feel that even if such a survey was not done, the intuitive thing would have been to do the opposite, yet retaining the support for "project folders inside project folders inside ....".

Posted by: km on April 21, 2007 at 04:50 AM

Try a recent nightly 6.0 build. It has been fixed.

Posted by: ludo on June 04, 2007 at 11:31 AM

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