Scope: Problems - Not Useful Enough

I hardly ever use the Scope: Problems because I don't find any value in it (or I'm not understanding it/using it properly)
It seems like it could be equivalent to the eclipse problems view.
I find that feature good for two reasons:

  1. Immediately shows where any errors are before you try to make/run/debug
  2. Gives a sense of quality/latency of the project as it progresses (e.g. is the new code/changes adding more warnings)


I have a few issues with the current IDEA implentation

  1. It just shows the files and doesn't break down to show the errors themselves
  2. Just like this 3 year old post (http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/message/5105355) says, there is no option to show warnings as well
  3. Files only seem to appear there once you have opened them, there is no background parsing of the project files on opening the project to populate this view
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10 comments

Actually the main reason I don't use this view is because it doesn't show all the problems in the project (item 3)
How about an option in the view that says something like
"Parse all files"

This would then go through the project and parse all the files as if they had just been opened in the editor.
That would then give a list of all the files with problems in the project. Rather than just a list of files with problems that you have opened.

Of course, once this is in place, the ability to expand each file to see each error/warning then becomes then next thing to make this view useful.

The final thing I can thing of is to then to be able to aggreagate the view not just by file, but by error.

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Hello opticyclic,

Actually the main reason I don't use this view is because it doesn't
show all the problems in the project (item 3)

How about an option in the view that says something like

"Parse all files"

This would then go through the project and parse all the files as if
they had just been opened in the editor.


For any non-toy project, this will be several orders of magnitudes slower
compared to simply doing a "make" (which has roughly the same effect on the
problems view).

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"


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I never use this feature at all, as i never found a clever way to use it effectively.
I'm curious if you guys at jetbrains use it and when/why ?

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In IU-92.24, make lists the errors in the output window but the scope is not updated until you open the files that have an issue.
Is the output of make supposed to update the problems view?

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Time rolls on and again I am finding that this would be useful.
I created an issue to get some traction.
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-68854

Everybody vote!

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> For any non-toy project, this will be several orders of magnitudes slower
compared to simply doing a "make"

Eclipse has it working for very large non-toy projects and performance is just fine.

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What Eclipse does is exactly what make does in IntelliJ IDEA.

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Does it mean that Make runs in background and compiles as you type showing the errors and warnings in real time (and displays the errors caused by your typing in *other files* too)?

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Yes, there is an option for automatic build and the Problems view appears with the syntax errors reported.

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The "parse all files" comment was a suggestion on getting the gutter warnings in this view.

These warnings are more akin to running inspect code than make and inspect code does take much longer.

However, make is not exactly the same as eclipse compile because the eclipse compile is outputting more warnings than javac - closer to what you see in the gutter.
Also the eclipse compiler runs more frequently as it does stuff in the background.

The other point that was being made was that even when you do make the window doesn't update until you open the file whereas eclipse updates the problems view regardless of whether you open it.

I'm not sure whether there have been changes to these points recently or not though.

There are lots of things that could be done to improve this view and are detailed in YouTrack.
Not everything need to be done together either. It could be a series of incremental changes to gradually make it better.
However, as far as I can tell, none of the suggested improvements have been implemented despite all the feedback.

To Gilles point: does anyone at JetBrains actively use it?
Maybe a blog post with screenshots showing how to use it efficiently would be useful for the community.

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