This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
In "standard" projects, profiler creates its own target in Ant file when ran the first time. In freeform project, it doesn't, instead it asks for selecting the target in build script. Why? If it can create the target on itself, why it cannot also in freeform project? And by the way: it's not nice to force me to create the IDE-specific target in main build file (in freeform project). In freeform projects all other IDE-specific targets (like "compile single") are created in nbproject/ide-targets.xml. It should be the same for profiler - the target should be generated automatically and stored in this file, not the main one.
In "standard" projects the IDE controls compiling & running the project, that's why also the profiler knows how to profile the project. For Freeform projects this is controlled by the buildscript implementation, the IDE just launches appropriate targets using Ant. That's why the profiler cannot create "profile" target, it simply doesn't know how to profile the project. Just imagine that you have a freeform web project where you control compiling of the app, starting your webserver and deploying the app there. All this is implemented in the buildscript to fit your app & server configuration. How could the profiler know which server you are deploing to in order to integrate with it and enable profiling on the server? Since you are the one who implements buildscript logic for freeform project - not the IDE, you also have to implement profiling. Thus closing this issue as INVALID. And BTW the profile target doesn't need to be ide-specific the same way like build target or any other targets aren't.
Ok I agree that depending on type of project the target will be different, so IDE does not know how to create it. However I cannot agree with second point: the profiler target IS IDE-specific; meaning it can be called from NetBeans, but not from others, like Eclipse, or command-line (am I wrong?). So I should be able to write this target in ide-targets.xml file, not main build script. Now it is not possible to choose this file. This changes a bit the topic of this issue, so we should probably mark this one as CLOSED, and file the new one, regarding using different ide-targets.xml file for profiler target?