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This is a RFE for having a utility/module to export and import user preferences/customizations. [Use case] I have created a bunch of custom project types, file types, customized my space/tab preferences and would like to replicate it across various installations. Currently, there is no supported way of doing this. [Justification] Currently, an end user has to perform customizations for every new NB build that she/he installs. One possible option is that the user uses the same user.dir for launching every new build, but this has potential problems of compatibility. If a new version decides to upgrade a particular property file, then it will be unusable with any previous release. The other option is to use heuristics and guess which files are needed (like config directory) and replicate them into the new user.dir and hope that everything runs smoothly. This is definitely not acceptable from an usability perspective. [Suggested Solution] Develop a module that takes care of exporting user preferences into a .nbm file which can then be imported into any new build without having to manually copy/paste files, etc. The module, could take care of exporting the preferences to a specified format, and accordingly, the module could also take care of importing preferences from the .nbm file.
Not sure if there are any current plans to work on such a thing. Has been suggested, but there is probably no one to work on it. The correct approach is to take the relevant files from $userdir/config/ (no these are not currently documented), make an XML layer representing those files, and build a no-code module (JAR and perhaps NBM) with that layer. Note that certain modules' settings are not currently amenable to this kind of thing - e.g. it is hard to share many kinds of editor settings since the granularity of what one file stores is a bit coarse.
Add the option of exporting non standard modules also and this RFE would be a wonderful thing.
Hi Jesse, To me it looks like we need a life-cycle handler as part of the core modules. Modules, which take the responsibility of handling their customizations, should implement these life-cycle APIs. The gist of these would be: * export customizations * import customizations The export would be a simple process, the import process will have to handle upgrades between customization versions. These APIs could be made part of the current module life-cycle i.e., load / unload / delete / etc. Actually it has been a long time since I have worked with NB, since my profession work is killing me, but i shall see if i can come up with something abstract atleast and send it out for review to the ndbdev list. But please do not count on that :) later.
Another example for this is that I have defined libraries in Library Manager in NB 5.0 for using with different projects. Later, I had to manually define every and all of my custom-added libraries in NB 5.5 RC1. Now, I have to do the same thing for NB 5.5 RC2. I don't like to import settings from a previous IDE install to make sure I get a "fresh" installation. Anyway, this one-time-only import when you install a new IDE version only works from previously inmediate version (4.1 ==> 5.0 and 5.0 ==> 5.5). There should be a way to import Library Manager entries and even been able to pick up which entries (libraries) to import. Thanks.
*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 42157 ***
This issue had *9 votes* before move to platform component