Jun Qian (钱骏) 's Weblog

Mass NetBeans Projects Opener

NetBeans project system is based on Apache Ant. When the project system advances in a newer version of NetBeans, the build scripts in your newly created projects will contain the latest and greatest changes. But what about your existing projects? NetBeans uses checksum comparison to determine if your existing projects' build scripts are up to date or not. If not, and if you haven't manually touched those files, NetBeans can automatically re-generate the build scripts for you. This auto-update usually happens when you open your projects in NetBeans.

This sounds wonderful. Every time you download a newer version of NetBeans, simply reopen your existing projects inside NetBeans will upgrade them to use the latest and greatest build engine. If the number of your projects is small, this is no big deal. What if you have 100 projects, say, as part of some automatic testing system? Manually opening all the projects one by one is not a very pleasant task. We need automation!

This "Mass Projects Opener" NetBeans module (available for NetBeans 5.5 and 6.0) provides ability to open and upgrade multiple co-located projects in one shot. Once installed, this module adds a new "Open All Projects..." action under the "File" menu. When invoked, it asks for a root directory that contains all the projects that you are interested in. It then (recursively) searches for all NetBeans projects under that root directory and opens them all.

This module also provides an "Open All Composite Application Projects..." action which can be used to open one particular type of  NetBeans project (in NetBeans Enterprise Pack) under the given directory. This was my original intention to write this module.

Now I only wish NetBeans had a command line interface to make the project upgrading even more painless... 

Posted at 07:14PM Mar 12, 2007 by Jun Qian in NetBeans  |  Comments[6]