Menu editor - work in progress ?

Hello Amnuriak,

At the moment there are no facilities for building menus with the UI Designer,
and we don't have any definite plans to work on that.

I'm trying to reconstruct some GUIs which I built using NetBeans
before. I figured this would be a nice opportunity to test IDEA's GUI
designer. Unfortunately, almost the very fist task at hand seems to be
impossible using IDEA as it appears it has no means of visually
creating/editing Menus (JMenu, JMenuItem, etc.).

I did some searching, including the forums, and it seems like Java's
native seperation of menus and their respective forms causes
difficulties for the GUI designer. Almost all the discussions I found
date back to 2003 to 2006 which is pretty old.

As version 9 has just been released I wonder if this topic has been
touched upon ? Imho, not giving any visual means of creating/editing
menus with the GUI designer is a major drawback for IDEA.

I tried to add JMenuBar, JMenu and JMenuItem to the palette using the
foundation source - that worked just fine. Then I tried to add the
menu components to the form which was a bit inconvinient, since the
GUI designer was not able to determine propper default settings and I
had to adjust them by hand. That's a bit troublesome but nothing to
complain about really. Trying to add some menu items to the menu was
impossible. I found no way to tell the designer the selected JMenu
component shall have a JMenuItem as "subordinate", "child" or whatever
you want to call it. How do I do this ?

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