Using the Project Manager

Your 3GL language development projects can be organized in a number of ways within the NetBeans IDE.  NetBeans provides you with a Project Management tool, where you can define properties that affect all your projects' source files and execution files.

These IDE project settings are initially derived from global properties (either Default or User level). Individual files inherit their properties from the project-level properties.

Working with Project Properties

A NetBeans project is the basic organizing principle in the IDE. You always work in an IDE project.  Whether it is the default project or one that you create, only one of these can be active at any given time. When you change projects (using the Project Manager) your whole IDE configuration changes as well. (For example, the directories and files you have mounted may be completely different.)  Although it is possible to ignore the concept of a project and still compile and build your source files, there are several productivity gains to working at the project level.

These productivity gains are:

–  You can assemble the files of a project from multiple directories (because the project is a representation of files all of which remain in their original directories.)

–  You can compile all files in the current project with one command.

–  You can create unique configurations for each project, including on which directories files are mounted and all the file properties: general, compiler, and execution.

–  Compiler and other properties that you set at the project level are automatically propagated to any files that you work with while the project is active.

Setting Up a Project

  There are two steps involved in setting up a project and its compilation properties:

 

          

Creating a new project from the Project Manager

The settings you find in a new project are those that are set up for 3GL language projects globally.

1.  Specify the project's compilation settings
From the Tools menu, select Options. Expand the Building folder and the Compiler node and select from your 3GL language's property sheets. In the property sheet, change properties as required. 

–  Properties for a new project are inherited from the global settings. That means the Default-level properties are inherited, unless User-level properties have been specified.

–  Unless you have specified the User level, all property changes that you make are applied at the Project level.