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NetBeans silliness: you don't own your extension

By Damien B on Thursday 23 March 2006, 03:58 - Cyberpunk - Permalink

According to your bug 44739, to be unable to change a file extension in NetBeans IDE is not a real problem. Well, maybe they use too often Microsoft Windows with the "hide known extensions" innovation activated. Unfortunately the problem exists for real. If you include a jsp fragment through <jsp:include>, you are advised to use the "jspf" extension. Now, if you include something with <%@include%>, there is no standard extension, and no, using "jspf" is not a good idea, because those two types of inclusion are two really different things. Imagine for now that your design changes for the static include to dynamic include... Leave aside NetBeans, change the file extension, come back to NetBeans, wait for the files tree to be refreshed, and trigger a clean build. Do you see a usability problem ? All I read is "Won't fix".

Comments

1. On Thursday 23 March 2006, 12:35 by Tim

True that there's no change-file-extension function in NetBeans, but you shouldn't need to restart NetBeans - just close the file, rename in a shell, and NetBeans will notice the new file there.

2. On Thursday 23 March 2006, 12:55 by Damien B

"Exit NetBeans" is badly worded, it should be "hide NetBeans", or "switch to another program". I'll rewrite the sentence.

3. On Thursday 23 March 2006, 13:03 by Tim

BTW, I've reopened the bug with a suggested fix.

4. On Sunday 22 February 2009, 11:08 by Damien B

February 2009, 3 years later, Netbeans 6: still unable to change a file extension within Netbeans. No target milestone set: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=27444
It's just lame.

5. On Wednesday 15 July 2009, 13:10 by

right click on the file in the file browser tree and select "rename". Voila. It's renamed. Works just fine.

6. On Wednesday 15 July 2009, 16:59 by Damien B

Wow anonymous, they managed to fix it after 3 major revisions? I'm impressed.

7. On Friday 25 December 2009, 08:09 by Namek

anonymous didn't understand something. It is about renaming EXTENSION. Here now we got NetBeans 6.8 version. Still can't do that. Only filename, without extension, is possible to be changed.

8. On Wednesday 31 March 2010, 15:25 by Carl

I found a klunky way to do it.
In the projects explorer, choose Properties in your file's popup menu and change the Extension property.
It's not ideal, but at least you don't have to wait for the tree to refresh.