General "queries" or communication channels pertaining to aspects of how files are used and related.

These queries permit a module to ascertain limited kinds of information about files or other interesting artifacts, where the information is ultimately supplied by a possibly unrelated module, without mandating a direct dependency. The querier is insulated from needing to understand, much less rely on details of, the model used by the query implementation.

Although the queries are heavily used by project-related code, they may be both queried and implemented without any projects at all.

{@link org.netbeans.api.queries.CollocationQuery} checks whether files are logically part of one directory tree and thus whether relative paths between them would have any sense. {@link org.netbeans.api.queries.FileBuiltQuery} can be used to see if a file that can be "built", currently needs to be. {@link org.netbeans.api.queries.SharabilityQuery} checks whether a file is intended to be important data kept in a version-control system.