Netbeans Project File Madness

Image via WikipediaFor the longest time one of my Netbeans targets was haunted by a component that I had long ago removed and moved to a different project. What would happen, a lot, is builds would suddenly fail with a message like this:

[ERROR] file:/C:/MyProject/EJBs/src/conf/xml-resources/web-services/ThatEJB/wsdl/ThatEJB.wsdl is unreachable

Failed to parse the WSDL.
C:\MyProject\EJBs\nbproject\jaxws-build.xml:112: wsimport failed

This was in spite of the fact that I had removed the target using the IDE, as "by the book" as possible. It should have cleaned up its target references, but obviously did not, and it just wouldn't let go.

What I had to do was open up C:\MyProject\EJBs\nbproject\jaxws-build.xml and remove all the references to the ThatEJB target. I had to do this once a week or so in fact, as the jaxws-build.xml file sometimes gets rebuilt (I don't know what triggers this rebuild, it doesn't seem to happen all the time).

I finally found the true source of the reference. I had to edit this file:

C:\MyProject\EJBs\nbproject\jax-ws.xml

This file contains an XML block for, it seems, each EJB, including ThatEJB. I completely removed that particular XML block. Problem solved.