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The current situation of Effective tab is not very useful. There should be a visual difference between the POM and effective POM, because that's what makes sense most of the time (why would I need to see the effective POM if not to compare and determine which parts were added because of inheritance ?). I would suggest either provide a Diff from POM and its effective POM (maybe consuming too much space) or just highlight the background rows that were added (something like when you create a breakpoint in debugger). NetBeans Dev 201208280001, Java 6u34 32bit, Win7 SP1 64bit
well, it works like versioning annotations, if you select a line, we color the lines coming from the same file. So selecting a line from current pom, will highlight all other lines from current pom. That's as much granularity we get. What's still missing is the right hand sidebar that would show the occurences in the entire file. Turned out to be quite complicated to add. There's too many things floating around to make a diff useful. 1. things coming from superpom add a lot of content 2. expressions are evaluated changing even the lines coming from current pom. 3. Not all content has origin information attached. Eg. plugin configuration elements. 4. In effective pom, things are moved around (eg. <reports> gets merged under the site plugin configuration, plugin config gets injected into the executions etc. We currently color just the sidebar with origins, might try also the rest of the line..
Seems like a complex functionality, indeed. Then the line highlighting will be a good compromise.
I haven't found any preexisting example where we would color entire lines on such possibly large scale. Aligning with the version control's annotate approach of coloring selected line's sidebar and other sidebar entries for lines coming from the same model appears adequate to me. I've added the right hand side entire file overview bar coloring as well in latest sources, see http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/images/e/e4/Effectivepom.png closing as wontfix, entire line coloring doesn't seem appropriate now