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There is currently no way to add a project as a dependent project of a free-form project. The project properties for a free-form project do not include a "Compiling Sources" field in the left panel. Without this feature, we need to add the source directories and JAR files manually to each separate free-form project. This is very inconvenient for projects that have multiple source directories and multiple JAR files.
This feature request is also related to Issue 52935 and will need that issue to be fixed before it is really useful.
If a freeform project includes in its classpath items which are known to be outputs of other projects, they will be considered subprojects for purposes of "Open Required Projects" in the GUI. The rest is up to your build script. I don't know what you think you're missing.
What we are missing is a way to specify a free-form project as a dependent project of another free-form project without needing to add all of the output JAR files and source directories of that project by hand. Our Java 3D project, for example, produces two jar files and has three source directories. I don't want to have to manually add those five directories/JAR files from that project to each free-form test project that uses Java 3D. Since NetBeans already has the information, I should just be able to add it by pointing to the Java 3D project.
When I manually add the JARs and source directories for dependent free-form projects with more than one output JAR file, NetBeans does not seem to consider this is a dependent project (at least not for the purposes of "Open Required Projects").
old tagret milestone, please re-evaluate
We would like this fixed in 4.2
Changing the default component owner to tzezula.