When I tried to update the PDF viewer in NetBeans 6.8, however, I got this interesting message…
“The module named org.netbeans.modules.editor.deprecated.pre61completion/0 was needed and not found” – definitely one of the more cryptic error messages I have seen recently…
A quick search on google revealed quite a few messages about the subject. It seems something has changed in release 6.5 and plugins originally written in older releases may be effected. There is a solution in the form of a new nbm module you can download to fix it, but I was not happy with this solution – I keep trying to make our downloads smaller and simpler.
Our plugin is setup as a LIBRARY project (jpedalLIBRARY) containing the jars we use and an plugin (PDFViewer) containing the actual plugin code bundled together as a module Suite (jpedalSUITE).
The solution I found was to tidy up the dependencies of the actual PDFviewer plugin project. This is accessed by choosing the project and then accessing properties from the menu. NetBeans is highly modular and you can set the dependencies (ie ensure that your plugin can access any required libraries). This is set in the properties menu. NetBeans allows you to add any dependencies and I had added several while experimenting which I did not need. 
I removed Editor and Editor library, and the problem disappeared! So the legacy issue appears to be in these modules.
So if you have this problem, you either need to prune your APIs – I have not worked out exactly which item contains the issue. And when you have finished, maybe you might like to try our free PDF viewer plugin (which now works in your shiny new copy of NetBeans 6.8)…
IDRsolutions develop a Java PDF library, a PDF forms to HTML5 converter, a PDF to HTML5 or SVG converter and a Java Image Library that doubles as an ImageIO replacement. On the blog our team post about anything interesting they learn about.
