Problem: Every modern operating system, file browser ... takes into account the fact that file names can have numbers and handles this case by sorting them in a natural way. i.e. If a folder contains 'f1.txt', 'f2.txt', and 'f19.txt' then most users would expect the order to be 1, 2, 19 and not 1, 19, 2. Most software out there does this by default. This would not be a big issue if there was some reasonable way for a developer to add support for their own SortMode in their Netbeans RCP app, but as I have found out(painfully) this is not the case.

Workarounds I have tried:
1) I tried creating my own DataFolder.SortMode class and replacing the 'public static final SortMode FOLDER_NAMES and NAMES' instances using reflection. But this leads to ClassCastExceptions in FolderOrder.java near line 158 <code>return ((FolderComparator)(getSortMode())).doCompare(obj1, obj2);<code>. Why is DataFolder.SortMode a public class, but FolderComparator is a package class that cannot be extended(thus making it impossible to use your own sorting order in a netbeans rcp application).

2) I then tried an even more complex solution by using javassist, cglib, and reflection to proxy the 'public static final SortMode' fields in the DataFolder object. This resulted in partial success(i.e. I created the cglib proxy and succeeded in in intercepting all public method calls on the SortMode instances), BUT, the FolderComparator.doCompare(...) method is private and thus cannot be intercepted even when using proxies. Even if this attempt succeeded, this would have been a bad programming practive, having to inject code into private fields and classes. The API should be more flexible.


After being humbled by this endeavor (waisted days trying to simply change the sorting for a netbeans rcp application). I would like to request/propose a few changes:

i) When sorting any file or folder by name, please do not use the default string comparison since this does not take into account the fact that files often have numbers in their names and thus the should be sorted using a more natural ordering system. Every modern operating system, file browser ... takes into account files with numbers. Why does the DataSystems API not do this by default.

ii) It should be possible for users/developers that wish to add/develop their own SortMode/FolderComparator to do so in a fairly simple manner, and not be blocked from doing so by the API's list of final static SortModes, private/package class FolderComparator, coupling of classes e.g. casting SortMode to FolderComparator in FolderOrder.java ...



My remaining options for solving this issue are to either set the SortMode to NONE for every folder in the project and mannually call DataFolder.setSortOrder() on every DataFolder that is created, and keep calling it every time a fileChange occurs. To me this is not efficient and would be buggy at best. Alternatively, I could patch the existing netbeans DataSystems source code and create my own version of org.openide.loaders.jar and add a maven dependency on that. This also seems to me to not be a longterm solution.

Does anyone have a better solution for creating a Netbeans RCP application that sorts files in a natural way (given the current netbeans implementation)?