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Bug 176614

Summary: [68cat] Provide flexible options for organising tree nodes
Product: ide Reporter: dynamite <dynamite>
Component: UIAssignee: issues@ide <issues>
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: normal    
Priority: P3    
Version: 6.x   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Linux   
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT Exception Reporter:

Description dynamite 2009-11-11 16:39:40 UTC 
Sometimes node trees can be rather long and deeply nested.  I find this in 
particular when I use the database explorer against a SQL Server DB.  For each connection there can be many catalogs and by the time I get as far as tables the nesting is 5 deep leaving a large white space to the left.  The nodes also tend to be in the middle and so scrolling to the top and bottom is a bit fiddly.  Typically I go between 3 or 4 out of many tens of databases.  Also the projects, files and favourites windows can all easily extend greatly and often contain a small range of things that are of particular interest at any moment in amongst less interesting things.

What would be ideal would be for the user to be given the means of managing a tree node so that it is lifted out of the noise.   I propose the following:

1. Windows showing trees to have a 2 views that is toggled through the context menu: complete and selective.  A menu item for the window will exist to toggle between the 2 views.  The complete view is as currently shown.  In selective mode then only tree nodes that are selected will be shown.  Tree nodes are selected through an "add to/from from selective view" menu item.  Parent nodes of selected nodes are not shown.

2. Provide a means for defining tree nodes under which selected nodes can be optionally added.  This could allow for a more flexible project structure.  For instance, it might be possible to define "working sets" into which the user can put the most commonly used packages, classes, resources, XML files, specific database tables from the database explorer etc for different tasks where those may come from a number of projects.
Comment 1 Jiri Kovalsky 2009-11-16 14:24:14 UTC 
Reported by NetCAT 6.8 participant.
Comment 2 Ondrej Langr 2009-12-07 05:47:46 UTC 
On behalf of NetBeans UI team, although I'm not generally against some kind of customizing the project tree, I'm not very fond of the particular solution suggested. I think any solution to this problem (I agree it is a problem) should be virtually invisible for normal users (yet discoverable), should not require extensive management effort (top-used items change every now and then) and should not clutter current UI. 

Will try to have a look at it later and try if we can better adjust the IDE to users for whom the trees and other lists do not scale well .. probably current favorites window could be used for this, i.e. could be customized to contain links to frequently used artifacts. Switching the Project/Favorites tab would then work for switching the two modes.
Comment 3 dynamite 2010-01-03 05:26:00 UTC 
Thank you for looking at this.  My desire behind the request is to have some means of allowing the user to structure the nodes presented in Projects/Services etc.  It is this that matters to me rather than the actual mechanism given.  I felt though that it was better to offer a possible solution.

I should say that the Services tab concerns me as much as Projects.  SQLServer databases typically have many catalogs and I frequently find myself having to scroll around with a small scroll bar, even though the actual number of nodes that I use would little more than fill the tab.