Phase 2 IDE Support¶
Introduction¶
This documents the proposed features for the 2nd Phase IDE Support. These are enhancements, many or most of which are unavailable in any other 4GL development tool. The objective here is to be best in class (i.e. for our IDE support to be uniquely powerful and capable).
See also Phase 1 IDE Support.
Scoped Resources Overlay¶
The scopes of resources (like buffers or frames) should be visually identified such that the developer can see exactly to which block the scope will attach. This should be a visual overlay in some way. For example, perhaps the background of the editor (and/or the right side gutter that shows the file-wide preview) will be colored a certain shade in order to denote the scope.
This probably should be toggle-able, maybe via latching toolbar buttons.
To achieve this, some analysis would need to move from annotations to early annotations.
Transaction and Block Properties¶
Make the transaction and block properties explicit and visible directly in the editor. This might be an overlay like scopes or otherwise displayed in some useful fashion.
Index Selection and Query Details¶
Expose details (which otherwise are not visible) about each query to the developer, directly in the editor.
Virtual Frame Definition¶
Have a view for each frame that gathers up the full frame definition as if it was a single statement. This is something that we calculate in the conversion which is never seen by the developer. Seeing how the various UI language statements contribute to a complete definition will be a powerful tool.
It would probably be useful to be able to save or export this in some way, rather than just displaying it visually.
We could even consider rendering the frame visually, though we would need more info for that to be correct (e.g. fonts and colors cfg...).
More Ideas¶
#10700 expose analytics features in our IDE support
expose call graph features directly in the IDE
#3703 implement TRPL based linting support
#10726 calculate and report code quality metrics
#10701 implement support for generative AI code assist
#11435 provide full access to Code Analytics from agentic AI
#11438 provide access to Call Graph from agentic AI
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