Make maven dependencies diagrams useful!
Answered
IDEA (Ultimate only?) has the feature to generate a diagram with maven dependencies.
However to be honest currently this feels like a proof-of-concept implementation:
I think the main reason people do not complain about it more often is that it is
- hard to discover the feature
You have to right-click on a module in the maven toolwindow.
Right clicking on a pom.xml does not working, because the option is missing in the "Maven" submenu.
It is not really advertised. - Once you try it, you discard it pretty soon as not-really-useful
For me the main problems are
- It only works upwards the pom hierarchy.
If you invoke it on the parent module, you get to see exactly one node (event if there are dozens sub-modules in your local project). - It shows all library dependencies without an option to filter them out
For my project when invoked on the leaf node that represents the main web application this generates a diagram with hundreds and hundreds of nodes where our own nodes are only a tiny fraction.
This gets worse because of the next problem: - It shows a tree with duplicated nodes rather than a directed, acyclic graph with unique nodes
If twenty modules use "commons-lang3" you get that node twenty times.
There are dozen more problems, just search in Youtrack for "maven diagram".
So:
Do you values the potential usefulness of this feature enough to demand (users) and implement (JetBrains) enhancements?
Post is closed for comments.
More than 2 years, and no reply.
This feature is very useful and is available in Eclipse.
Please consider this request.
Hi, we have a ticket to rework maven dependency tree view:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-142027