NetBeans Screenshot of the Week #33: Finding Unresolved Symbols

In my last entry I showed that the Fix Imports action will alert you to an unresolved symbol. This is really helpful since it can help you track down runtime problems. Obviously, you shouldn't have to go run Fix Imports on every file, periodically, to look for unresolved symbols! NetBeans has a special semantic checker for this. It is off by default, for two reasons: I added it just a couple of days ago - during the stabilization period for EA, so I didn't dare enable it in case it's seriously broken. There are cases where it doesn't yet work. I'll describe that later. To enable it, open up the Editor options dialog, and under Hints, select Python. You should now see the current batch of Python hints. Enable the "Unresolved Symbol" hint: Now let's open up the datetime.py file again: As you can see, the file is marked erroneous (by the red square above the scrollbar), and the scrollbar indicates where in the file the error is. Clicking on it to expose the error location you can see an underline under the unresolved symbol, and a tooltip explaining what the problem is. The error is also shown in the tasklist, so you don't have to open each file to look for problems - just let the tasklist scan your project for problems. Here's another example. I opened up the Django 1.0 sources, and NetBeans pointed out this problem to me, in django.utils.simplejson.tool: This shows that the import is unused, and that the at...

Date: November, 11 2008
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/netbeans_screenshot_of_the_week1

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