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Problem description: The current design with 2 separate project templates for creating projects from scratch and using existing sources appears to be a serious problem during the out of the box experience. In the usability studies dealing with importing existing sources the participants don't notice "with existing sources" project templates and choose the "empty" project templates. At least half of the participants have this problem. In most cases the facilitator has to point the participant to the correct project template. Another point is that having 2 project templates for creating same projects (either from scratch or from existing sources) doesn't scale as for every new project "type" we need to have 2 instead of one project templates. Solution: The users' mental model is to create an empty project and then "add" the sources into such project. Merging those templates together means permitting the user to pick existing sources in the wizard. Some kind of "Add existing sources" checkbox should be present in the "Name and Location" wizard step which would enable next wizard steps for specifying existing sources. A drawback would be that the user creating a project from scratch would have to deal with more options than necessary. --- Note that even though I'm filing this issue as part of the 6.1 planning, the real intention is to address this issue either in 6.1. or in one of the upcoming releases.
I think that it's good idea and should be implemented. however these two wizards are not quite the same on the first page - the main difference is that "from existing sources" wizard allows to enter own project folder name and also own build script name e.g. if user already have some build script for those sources that are being imported into the project. These two things need to be sorted out - if we should allow own project folder and own build script name even for "regular" projects. Otherwise those wizards could be just merged together, probably with checkbox or toggle button group for "Create main class" and "Import Existing sources". If "Import ..." option is selected then wizard would advance with other two panels of "from existing sources" wizard.
*** Issue 132514 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Wiki topic showing possible solutions of the problem: http://wiki.netbeans.org/MergeFromScratchAndFromExistingSourcesNewProjectWizards