Symfony Annotations are special cases and this feature wasn't designed to handle that (and it can't do that simply in this PHPDoc parser implementation). It's an enhancement for next release.

Thank you for your reply.

Is it possible to exclude some use statements from being deleted? (Simple Blacklist)
So NetBeans don't need to parse annotations. (It would always be error-prone because of aliases.)

For example:
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

class Author {
    /**
     * @Assert\NotBlank()
     */
    public $name;
}

Thanks a lot!

Unfortunately not now. It's a first implementation of this feature and that Doctrine style is really awful. That an annotation name (which is just a Comment, so NO build-in language support) is driven by use statements, which are a common language constructs. Really ugly...but we will think about that in next version. "Black list" is one of possibilities.

*** Bug 214939 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 215107 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I was, and still am, very excited about the addition of Doctrine 2 annotations support into the editor. However, with the current implementation, this feature will more than likely go unused on almost every Doctrine 2 project due to the use statement convention mentioned here. Zend Framework 2 also recently implemented an annotation manager to assist with building forms that follows a similar methodology http://packages.zendframework.com/docs/latest/manual/en/modules/zend.form.quick.start.html

I can definitely understand the sentiment about utilizing a language construct to assist with annotations but this seems to be the consensus as far as implementation goes for most PHP projects, which means the beautiful work that has been done getting these annotations supported in the editor may never see the light of day for most users unless something can be done to recognize these use statements and identify their usage within comment blocks. Not only would the editor need to recognize their validity but in order for code completion to work it would need to identify the alias of the use statement and be able to provide hints and suggestions when the user typed the alias for that annotation set. 

eg. use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

If I can't start typing @ORM and get a list of suggested annotations that Doctrine 2 supports, I can't imagine how much this feature will be getting used. This is probably further complicated by individuals who use a different alias in their use statement as the editor would need to be smart enough to identify the use statement, grab the alias, prefix all of the Doctrine 2 annotations with the alias, and then provide suggestions when the prefix was typed in a comment block. 

I'm really looking forward to a future release where this functionality can be enhanced as I think this is extremely fantastic work and greatly improves quality of life for many large projects utilizing these frameworks.

Just to clarify: I think @ccomer is talking about auto-completion for annotations. That would be cool, but this issue is simply about not marking "use" statements as unused if they are actually used to support annotations. A separate issue from annotation auto-completion, probably easier to implement, and (in my opinion) more important.

ccomer's use case is another enhancement issue, this one is about matching use statements with right annotation names.

A filled a new issue #216200 which tracks that CC problem of "typed annotations" as a reminder for me.

Custom annotation parsers are implemented in dev build.

Seems to be working great as of 7.3 beta 2. Good work!

So for some reason *some* annotations are marked as unused whereas others are properly detected. I really have no idea what the difference is between them.

Created attachment 151836 [details]
Inconsistent use statement usage detection

Probably some new annotations which were not available during implementation.

Please, file it as a new P3 bug, thanks.