Sunday, October 16, 2011

NetBeans project for Play - fixing the source path

If you used NetBeans with Play framework, you could notice one feature, missing from Eclipse counterpart. In NetBeans "Navigate | Go to source" does not show the internals of Play framework, while in Eclipse the sources are readily available. So I decided to fix the command which creates NetBeans project.

The commands of Play framework are located in framework/pym/play/commands, they are good old python scripts. The one responsible for netbeansify command is in file netbeans.py. Looking at the sources, I immediately spotted a useful shortcut: intstead of play netbeansify we can run play nb, I like that! :) Eclipse fans, consider switching, our command is shorter (just kidding, eclipsify has a shortcut, too)

Anyway, to fix the problem with "navigate to sources" I replaced the following lines:

    if os.name == 'nt':
        replaceAll(os.path.join(nbproject, 'project.xml'), r'%PLAY_CLASSPATH%', ';'.join(classpath + ['nbproject\\classes']))
    else:
        replaceAll(os.path.join(nbproject, 'project.xml'), r'%PLAY_CLASSPATH%', ':'.join(classpath + ['nbproject/classes']))

to these lines:

    newClasspath = []
    playJar = 'framework%splay-%s.jar' % (os.sep, play_env['version'])
    [newClasspath.append(x) for x in classpath if not x.endswith(playJar)]
    replaceAll(os.path.join(nbproject, 'project.xml'), r'%PLAY_CLASSPATH%', ';'.join(newClasspath + ['nbproject%sclasses'%os.sep, '%s%sframework%ssrc'%(play_env["basedir"], os.sep, os.sep)]))

If you already have NetBeans project for your Play application, you need to generate it again, and reopen the project in NetBeans, to see the changes.

I sent the fix to the Play framework developers, hope they accept it and you will not need to patch the script very soon.

Crossposted to Tikal Community site

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