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Most of the participants didn't understand the meaning of the 'Context path' field. Add a brief help in the bottom of the panel explaining what is the purpose of the Context path field (the purpose is that the debugger needs it to be able to debug webmodules).
Still not very clear in 4.1. Jano, any concrete suggestion, please?
I have several (crucial) questions about this field: - Why isn't the value read from the deployment descriptors? - Why does the IDE need it, if the deployment is driven by the user provided deployment descriptor and Ant task?
Q: Why isn't the value read from the deployment descriptors? A: There is no way how to get (and also set) the context path from the deployment descriptor in freeform project. That's why we need to ask the user for it. Q: Why does the IDE need it, if the deployment is driven by the user provided deployment descriptor and Ant task? A: The purpose is written in the first comment. It is necessary to set the context path to be able to debug the web application - the debugger needs to know the application to attach and for this it needs to know the context path.
Re: Q1: I believe there is theoretically a way to do that, since we are doing it in classic projects - but unfortunatel not in the "New Web App With Existing Sources" wizard. The only difference is that we don't know the location of server specific deployment descriptor. But could the file be found in the project folder (in promo xyz)? For 4.1. we might fix this with a label (which is problematic because we are out of screen estate - due to Tiger vs J2EE 1.4 issue) or fix in promo F in some smart way. Re: Q2: Ok, I though that the debugger is just attaching to the server (to the JVM), not to the application.
Re "can the server specific DD be found". Well, probably in some cases. One issue is you do not even know what type of server the user is using and thus what is the file name of server specific DD. Then you do not know how to read it. If it is one of the server types that we support (and this is questionable, as I would expect one motivation to use freeform would be that you can deploy from Ant to other servers) and if there is a server specific file only for that one type of server (this would be typical) the we can in theory ask the plugin to read the file and give us context path.
So far we have not concluded on the purpose/affect of this field in the wizards "New Web Application with Existing Sources" and "New Web Application with Existing Ant Script.
TM 5.0->TBD
Old issue, not clear how to solve, changing to TASK.
This old bug may not be relevant anymore. If you can still reproduce it in 8.2 development builds please reopen this issue. Thanks for your cooperation, NetBeans IDE 8.2 Release Boss