What is the faces-config.xml.jsfdia file for?

Question

Some research I did revealed that the faces-config.xml.jsfdia file is generated by eclipse as some kind of diff for the faces-config.xml (source), that it sometimes causes deployment issues on older JBoss servers (source).

And the first couple hundreds of google results also demonstrated that many project actually keep their faces-config.xml.jsfdia under version control.

Is it oversight? Is the file actually good for something? Even without having the faces-config.xml under version control, eclipse has a local history which it could use to restore the config, so why would it keep a separate diff of the settings? There isn't even a (would be quite useless anyway) "revert config" option, so what's the point?

Thank you

Answer 1

The faces-config.xml.jsfdia file is the Eclipse-specific file which contains the diagram representation of faces-config.xml. If you open the faces-config.xml file and switch to Diagram tab (there are three tabs at left bottom of the editor view; Diagram, Tree and Source), then this file will be auto-created if not present. It remembers all diagram drawings which of course can't be remembered in faces-config.xml file itself.

You need to add this file to the ignore list of your version control program. E.g. the .hgignore file in project root in case of Mercurial:

syntax: regexp
\.jsfdia$

Or the .gitignore file in case of git:

*.jsfdia