Netbeans ghost file a show stopper, how to fix it?

In the last few years I've encountered "ghost files" in Netbeans, but I didn't have proof of it, so I had to live with it and when I tried to explain the situation, it's hard to believe, now I have proof of it and it's a show stopper, any fix for it ?

It goes like this, I have a Java class that I've been using for many years, sort of a tool, I add a bit as I have more experience, but once in a while, after I added a new method, and used it in another class, Netbeans couldn't recognize it, it seemed to me Netbeans was still looking at the old copy of the class where the newly added method didn't exist. And yet if I copied this updated class to another project, the new method works fine and Netbeans can find it. In NB 6.7 it just开发者_开发知识库 acted like the class froze in time, any new additions to it wouldn't be recognized, now when I tried it in NB 6.9 I could catch the "ghost" !

It happened by accident, yesterday after I updated the class, I tried to use the new method in another class in the same project, the red flag went up, it couldn't find the new method, so I moused over the new method call, and right clicked on it, "Navigate" => "Go to source", bang the ghost showed up ! If I do this in NB 6.7, it just rang a bell as if it's telling me it couldn't find it. But in NB 6.9 it goes to the "source" which is not my java class source file[Get_Time.java], it's another generated file, so I moused over the opened "ghost" file name in the editor, the name was "C:\Users\USER.netbeans\6.9\var\cache\index\s117\java\14\gensrc\Get_Time.java(read-only)", the content seemed like a skeleton of my source file Get_Time.java , but definitely different, and I am pretty sure it's this "ghost file" that's been causing problems.

During the course of development I occasionally changed the system time to test different functions in the class, could this caused the ghost file to mess up, if I change the current time to 2016 and modified the source file, then NB might record the file last changed in 2016, and if I change the time back to 2011, and add a new function, it wouldn't accept it, because it might compare the dates of different versions of source file and stick with the "latest time stamp" ?!

I wish NB never keep ghost files, "Always Use The Actual Source File", this would avoid a lot of such problems. I did try to delete that ghost file, but the next time I compiled, it's generated again. I don't want to delete too much content from "C:\Users\USER.netbeans\6.9...", it might mess up my NB setting. Anyhow, it's now a show stopper, I can't add more changes to the class, it's frozen in time, what's the fix ?

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Just some suggestions as I got stung by this problem before. Did you built a jar and added dependency to this jar manually?

e.g.

1) project A is packaged into A.jar with a class Time.

2) project B depends on A.jar and project A

3) Time.java in project A is changed

4) project B will not see the changes as it'll always read from the A.jar built before the change happen.

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Try deleting NetBeans' cache (~/.netbeans/6.9/var/cache/index/ directory) when you go back to the future and forward to the past. NetBeans is probably getting a bit confused by the file timestamps. Since it is somewhat of an edge case to be hopping around dates like that, I doubt it would be something NetBeans would give a high priority in attempting to fix/handle.