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It is painful when designing a form to change the type of a component. Currently, you have to select it, delete it, find the new component, re-add it, reapply any properties the old component had, and fix your layout. it would be great to an action which will allow you to replace a bean with another in the place in the UI where you are working and keep the same layout, and keep any properties that were common between the 2 components.
I agree, NetBeans GUI builder is missing this feature for a long time. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 112250 ***
I disagree that this is a duplicate of 112250. 112250 is talking about having a class, and changing it to a different class, and morphing the auto-generated code. That is not what I was asking for in this bug I am talking about changing the type of one variable on a form. For example, if you have a panel that has a component on it (e.g a text pane), and you realise you want to change it to a different type of component (e.g. a text area), you have to delete the old component, and add the new one. this makes your layout change and you lose any common properties.
As dingfelder said, it is really painful to change from one component to a subclass which should be really easy to implement in NB.
The original description in bug 112250 maybe was not clear enough, but we always considered it to be exactly the request you just described here. I've added a comment for clarification. And I agree this would be really useful. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 112250 ***