Libor Kotouc wrote:

Hi,

does anyone know why we don't have standalone Undeploy action on the project node?

-L. 

Pavel Buzek wrote:

I remember many discussions about the deployment actions. This is coming to our
attention periodically, because it is still not solved well.

To answer your question: the reason for not having Undeploy is that we want to
keep the list of actions to a reasonable size and this is not needed that much,
especially if run/deploy would work as intuitively as it should...

Now to that Run/Deploy again [sorry, but this IS IMPORTANT since the user does
this all the time]:

My opinion is that we should have just RUN and have two check boxes in project
properties:

[x] Display browser on Run
   Show URL: __________
[ ] Undeploy the application if previously deployed

Ideally we would have only Run and

[x] Display browser on Run
   Show URL: __________

but the problem is that the cleverness of j2eeserver in determining when to
undeploy is limited. For example it does not handle JSF and some other
frameworks well. Fast deployment is nice but getting it right is much more
important.

As we discussed recently Deploy (meaning: undeploy if deployed, deploy and do
not show the browser) is very confusing. It is hard to know that this is the way
to do forced undeploy before deployment. It is hard to come up with a better
name for this action ("Undeploy, Deploy and Run" is nice but long :-) It would
be much easier to explain in project properties. Plus it never shows the
browser, so it does not solve the case when I want to do a clean deploy and show it.

IIRC, the argument against putting:

[ ] Undeploy the application if previously deployed

into project properties was that it will be hard to find.
But you use projects properties to set the context path, relative URL and the
target server itself, and the "[x] display browser", so I do not see this as a
problem. Another argument was that this would make it hard to go back and forth
between clean deployment and clever minimal deployment. But I think this is also
not so relevant. Again, you have the same problem with [x] Display browser, and
I also do not see a compelling reason to go back/forth on this, I's just use one
of them all the time (for that project).

But it was decided otherwise. Sorry for reopening it again, but imagine how
annoying this is when you are developing an app that you KNOW will require full
undeploy/deploy every time you test it the IDE will not figure it our when you
use Run action. Then you have to do Deploy (which has no shortcut.. ouch!) and
Run - which does part of what Deploy just did.

Not for 5.0, of course ;-)
Peace,
-pavel 

Libor Kotouc wrote:

Nice solution (to set the action behavior in the project's properties)  :)

I like 'Display browser on Run' checkbox in the project properties but not the
latter one ('Undeploy if...') bcs I would prefer better accessibility of the
Undeploy action. The reason is that I need (nearly) always to show a result of
my changes in a browser but I undeploy rarely (but still often enough to have
this action in a contextual menu).

I would prefer Run and Undeploy actions in a project's contextual menu and
'Display browser...' checkbox in the project's properties.

-L. 

Marco Walther (Marco.Walther@Sun.COM) wrote:

I/Creator do have the needed Ant task nbundeploy.  I do actually an undeploy 
on clean.  (It does not help too much on Windows because PE has still some 
file locking issues.)

But Creator does not have a specific Undeploy Context Menu action on the 
project (Could easily be added;-).

But it's easy to undeploy applications from our Server Navigator/your Runtime 
tab.

Thanks,
-- Marco

Lets use this wording:

Enterprise and Web application Run properties:
-----
[x] Display Browser on Run
    URL: |__________________________________________________________|
         (relative to the context path, e.g. /admin/login/index.jsp)

[ ] Undeploy Application Before Each Run
-----

EJB module Run properties:
-----
[ ] Undeploy Module Before Each Run
-----

Enterprise and Web application and EJB module contextual menu:
-----------------
Run Project
Debug Project
Undeploy Project
-----------------

-> j2eeserver