Automatically remove explicit package declarations with import statements in Java

Question

I have a project created by others that includes thousands of class files and has the package names explicitly typed out for every reference to any of their classes. It looks like the code was reverse engineered. Is there a good tool for Java that refactors the code so that the explicitly typed package prefixes are removed from class references and moved into import statements.

Thank you in advance.

EDIT:

I think an example will help. I want to have the imports at the top, and I don't care how many imports there are.

javax.swing.JButton button1 = new javax.swing.JButton();

Imagine the code above but absolutely everywhere in thousands upon thousands of lines of code amongst thousands of class files. I would like to be able to remove all of the prefixes and just have a nice import javax.swing.JButton; at the top of each class file.

Answer 1

I don't know a tool for this use case, but I had to do something similar a few month ago.

• Write a script or do a search replace with regex to get rid of the explicitly typed package prefixes.

• Than let eclipse do the rest using "organize imports". Ctrl-1

Hint: to avoid ambiguities, setup the classpath with no more than the required libs. For sround about 800 classes I was done in 2 hours.

• Or get someone who deserved it to do this job.

EDIT: You should know that in Prefeneces/Java/Editor/Save Actions, Organize imports can be configured as save action.

Answer 2

For a single type, eclipse offers the 'Add import' action (Shift+Ctrl+M). It does exactly what you want - with the big, big limitation: you have to place the cursor on a type and it will only affect that 'selected' occurrence.

But maybe this action can be used in a scripted/global method. A JDT plugin could crawl through the AST and call this action on every type it finds.