This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
There are a number of UI problems here: 1. The internationalization wizard, and the dialog produced by the Internationalize menu item do almost exactly the same thing - they even have some panels in common. Kill one or the other, it's confusing. 2. We know now that caching resource bundles in static variables is a bad idea for memory consumption reasons. The wizard should not offer this (it only does in advanced mode - has anyone ever found advanced mode?) 3. Button text on pane 2 "Select Resource" vs. "Select all" is confusing. I wouldn't expect a button that says "Select all" to open a chooser dialog. Better text would be good, best might be: Remove the "Select all" button entirely - the user will select everything in the table if they need to, this button is non intuitive....and change Select Resource to Choose Resource. 4. Having suggested item 2, I suggest killing Advanced mode entirely. Entering property keys and values in a table is more work than in an editor. And the property to turn on advanced mode in the options dialog is incredibly well hidden. 5. Kill "Insert Internationalized String" - again, it's much less work for someone to type the code to do this than to use the tool; it's also pretty non-obvious what this does (you select it from the Internationalize submenu of the Node's Tools submenu and it inserts a string at the current caret position in the editor - who needs this?) Probably 80% of the complexity of this module could be removed and result in a marked usability improvement.
I agree.
Another ugly UI contribution are i18n actions. We have one action that is a popup presenter enabled on i18n'alizable nodes (java, form, jsp). It is shown as a sub-submenu of object. Another actions is defined as a menu presenter and it is submenu of Tools menu and always enabled. My suggestion - extend i18n'ed objects directly with proper action (should be possible as a result of issue #45137) and remove existing tools action + simplify presentation in Tools main menu. Perhaps this can also eliminate part of complexity with i18n factories.
Accepted. It probably will not get into NB 4.1. I hope it will get into the subsequent release.
Some additional feedback received by email: Wizard: 1. allow single resource file for multiple sources. right now, users have to browse and select resource bundle for each source file 2. save last accessed resource bundle 3. key: right now it's the whole string with space replaced with "_" should limit to, say, 4 words or 12 chars also, allow prefix
Minor comment on #1: We might want to make the default the NetBeans code convention of a per- package Bundle.properties, and only give the option to select a bundle file if >1 .properties files already exist in the package. Probably we don't want to support cross-package .properties files (all strings for an app in one properties file), simply because once the properties files get big enough, it adds some performance overhead due to parsing keys that may not actually be used until much later if ever.