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Bug 234325 - Organization of projects not convenient if number of projects is large
Summary: Organization of projects not convenient if number of projects is large
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: projects
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Generic Projects UI (show other bugs)
Version: 7.4
Hardware: PC Windows 7
: P2 normal (vote)
Assignee: uireviews
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-08-13 12:30 UTC by Petr Somol
Modified: 2013-08-14 07:32 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Exception Reporter:


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Description Petr Somol 2013-08-13 12:30:17 UTC
Based on discussion with JavaFX team on 12 AUG 13 I quote:


> Organization of projects - concurrent IDE's one project with multiple modules easier than dealing with everything as a separate project. Can you tell me why? Are project settings inherited by modules? What specific pain points does this solve?

The one major benefit to having the entire project open is that when you do find usages or open file or whatever, it sees everything. I am very frequently looking at everything -- web, media, graphics, controls, scene graph, apps, tests, samples -- all the time. AFAIK, I would have to open all the NB projects to have the same functionality. But our workspace is setup as a nested workspace -- root has modules directory which has base, graphics, controls, web, etc. Root also has apps/samples apps/toys, etc. as well as tests/manual tests/functional etc.

Instead of having 50 top-level projects, I'd like to just have one top level project with everything else nested in the view.

The NB gradle was OK in that you had one tree that showed the projects, and when you double-clicked them you would then get the project opened up separately. At least the projects were hierarchical in one place, but I believe you had to open each individual project to do find usages across all projects. But in any event that is my use case -- I want all the code for all of JavaFX (including apps, samples, tests, and so forth) to all be available to me to find / search / etc at all times.

Other people might want to just see one particular module at a time, but for me I want to see it all.

------------
PS: Considering the above, I was wondering whether Project Groups could satisfy the described needs, bit it seems it would make sense to consider changes in the related UI and usability. Some ideas for discussion:

Make PG more prominent and accessible ? 
- enable more intuitive assigning/removing of projects to/from group
- provide groupwise operations like "build all projects in group", "test all projexts in group"
- provide group actions prominently in File menu
- altogether consider whether making the UI more project-group centric than project centric would not benefit not only users familiar with Idea but also NetBeans users
  
for Project Group related discussions see e.g.,
http://www.locked.de/div/NetBeans-projectgroups.swf
https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50683
https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=175264
https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=168556
wiki.netbeans.org/ProjectGroups
Comment 1 Petr Jiricka 2013-08-14 07:32:41 UTC
If the main requirement is related to the "find usages" action, then would not implementing issue 230534 solve this problem?