Bug 199683

Summary: Mark uninitialized properties in the Ant Editor
Product: [Eclipse Project] Platform Reporter: Daniel Beck <Daniel.Beck>
Component: AntAssignee: Platform-Ant-Inbox <platform-ant-inbox>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3    
Version: 3.4   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Daniel Beck CLA 2007-08-12 13:53:30 EDT 
Build ID: I20070625-1500

Steps To Reproduce:
1. Create an And build.xml file within Eclipse.
2. Copy the following content in that build file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<project default="main" basedir="../" name="Master">
        <property name="${drname}"  value="test_dir"/> 
	<target name="main">
		<mkdir dir="${dirname}"/>
	</target>
</project>

3. There is no hint that the property "${dirname}" is not initialized. It is not initialized because of a typo in <property name="drname" value="test_dir"/>



More information:
One would avoid typo errors if the Ant editor would sur-line uninitialized  properties (e.g. in yellow). 
Moreover, not initializing properties in Ant is "bad": they should have a default value in most cases. There are only rare occasions where one should introduce uninitialized properties (e.g. to simulate a if-then-else branch).

Intellij IDEA supports this feature.
Comment 1 Eclipse Webmaster CLA 2019-09-06 15:37:23 EDT 
This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.