This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
There is an unspecified behaviour in the way hints work today that should be changed. It's implemented in HintsTask. Currently, hints are not invoked in a guarded section. It is a good default, as guarded sections shouldn't be changed directly by hints, but there are valid use cases for evaluating a hint in a guarded section. First, one might have written a specialized hint that knows what to do to fix errors in a guarded section - changing the .form file for Matisse, for instance, or applying the fix correctly in a editor-generated BeanInfo file. Also a hint might be displayed next to the element it refers, but the fix will actually change code somewhere else - in the same file or even in a related file. It's possible to work around these limitations by writing a hint that runs on COMPILATION_UNIT, but it's a hack and makes hints analyze files that don't actually contain the trees they are interested in. Therefore, an annotation, marker interface or separate layer folder should be made available, since most hints shouldn't run on guarded blocks, but there must be a valid way for the ones who need to do so to state that.
Yes, I also think that cooperation with guarded sections can be improved.