Make moving assets and renaming classes completely safe

Recently I’ve experienced tons of errors and complications due to renaming classes or moving assets from one folder to the next. It breaks references in blueprints, corrupts them, makes them unusable, and leaves invisible “redirectors” laying around, which can create conflicts with similarly-named files.

For instance, refactoring and renaming a custom c++ UserWidget class, which a UMG Widget BP uses as parent, will cause that Widget to become unusable and all your UI design will be lost. There is no way (to my knowledge) to reparent a blueprint that you cannot open.

Is there anything Epic could do to fix this and make it more user-friendly? Maybe an in-editor option to rename a class and fix all project references? Or simply an option to reparent a corrupted BP by right-clicking on it?

Yeah I get this too. Here’s a couple more to add to the list that have been bugging me lately:

If you delete a blueprint that was being used in a map at an earlier point in the project, you can’t rename (or create a new asset) with the same name in the folder the original was located. This happens even though that asset no longer exists, and had all references removed before being deleted.

Also moving folders containing assets that either are, or previously were being used in a level, will leave empty folders that if deleted will re-appear after reloading your project. They can usually be manually deleted in Windows, but this will sometimes break references (because of invisible re-directors). It would be helpful if we could see/open these re-directors so we can manually update references.

Normally, right clicking on the content folder and selecting ‘fix up re-directors’ solves these issues (except the invisible folder one).
I often re-organise my directories and have never encountered an when doing this.

Ah, I see. I was wondering if there was a way to “Apply” redirectors and delete them, and that seems to be it.

It doesn’t fix the c++ class renaming, but it does fix the asset moving/renaming part