Quick File Chooser in NetBeans 6.1

I'm on a roll today, but I thought I'd drop this tip as well.

I'm a big fan of the NetBeans Quick File Chooser plugin, it makes it oh-so-easy to open up a file without having to detach my fingers from the keyboard. So, if you Google for the plugin, you'll find Tor's recommendation of the same; however, you can't find it on the Plugin Center . So, what if you really wanted to use the Quick File Chooser, in NetBeans 6.1, what should you do ? In the past, I've always copied the plugin with my netbeans preferences from the previous version that I've used, and it's worked OK. However, I decided on a clean NetBeans install on my home laptop, and I couldn't get my hands on it.

So, I followed a tip from Octavian's blog , added the Netbeans Latest Build update center, and ... voila, the Quick File Chooser is in the list of available plugins. Since it doesn't depend on any of the features of 6.1+ code, it works great in 6.1 as well.

Groovy HTML Encode

I kinda thought that in the past I had used a special Groovy method to encode something as HTML. I mostly need that when I need to post something to Blogger (which completely baffles me - why isn't there a better way of copy-and-pasting html/xml in blogger content ???) . I do know that in Grails, there are a couple of special methods that you can use if you want to encode something as html, json, or something else. However, I'm not using Grails right now, so that's not always the best option.

After wasting 15 minutes trying to remember exactly how I did it in the past, I realized that I was using StringEscapeUtils from Apache commons-lang. So, having remembered that, it just works like magic, here is what I use to convert my xml/html samples in order to post them on Blogger:

this.class.classLoader.rootLoader.addURL(new File("/usr/local/java/grails-1.0/lib/commons-lang-2.1.jar").toURL())


xml = '''
<module id="id" version="0.0.1" package="package"> </module>
'''
org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(xml).split("\n").each() {println it }

, which outputs the following :
&lt;module id=&quot;id&quot; version=&quot;0.0.1&quot; package=&quot;package&quot;&gt; &lt;/module&gt;

, which is what I paste into blogger and it works like magic !!!

No more running around like a headless chicken trying to find some service online that will convert my html/xml snippets !

Freeform projects NetBeans JUnit test results : binding output to source code

As I had mentioned in a prior post a while back, it is pretty straightforward to bind the output of a Freeform Project JUnit task to the NetBeans JUnit test results. However, there are a couple of minor tweaks that I find myself making and forgetting, so, I thought I'd drop a blog entry, even just as a reminder for myself.

First, make sure that the JUnit task as a showoutput="true" attribute and has a formatter that explicitly states that doesn't use a file, e.g.

<formatter usefile="false" type="brief"/>

Emphasis on not using a file : e.g. you can use an xml formatter and it would work; however, if you don't specify the usefile="false" attribute, everything goes to the file and NetBeans doesn't get a chance to capture the output and display the results in a nice JUnit test results tree. As a result, the best combination ends up being a combination of a xml formatter that outputs to a file, and a brief formatter that doesn't, e.g. :


<junit fork="yes" printsummary="withOutAndErr" showoutput="true" errorProperty="test.failed" failureProperty="test.failed" filtertrace="false">
<formatter type="xml">
<formatter usefile="false" type="brief" />
<classpath refid="whatever-path-id">
</classpath>
</junit>

The second important part of working with the JUnit results in NetBeans is to make sure that when a test fails, when you click on the failure in the JUnit results, you want NetBeans to take you to the right line in the source code:

In order to accomplish that, make sure that you properly set the output directory for your test cases in your NetBeans project with the UI or project.xml:

• In the Project Properties UI
  

• In the nbproject/project.xml
  

...
<java-data xmlns="http://www.netbeans.org/ns/freeform-project-java/2">\n ....
<compilation-unit>
<package-root>test/integration</package-root>
<unit-tests/>
<classpath mode="compile">${test.completion.classpath}</classpath>
<built-to>dest/test/unit</built-to>
<source-level>1.5</source-level>
</compilation-unit>
....
</java-data>
....