Search additional roots

[gbodeen]

Signed-off-by: Gabriel Bodeen gabriel.bodeen@ericsson.com

What it does

This adds a preference for additional root directories to search in both the Search-In-Workspace widget and the File-Search (ctrl+p) menu.

In interviews with our users, one of their requests was for the search features to be able to find code that wasn't technically within their workspace, but that was located in other, closely-related directories. For particularly large directories, it can be advantageous to make the code easily searchable with Theia without incurring other costs such as file watching.

I wanted to check whether there was appetite for this preference to be added directly to the Theia project. This preference explicitly goes beyond what is currently available in VS Code.

How to test

1. Build Theia and launch with the Theia repository as the workspace.
2. Search the preferences for additional, switch to Workspace scope, and edit the JSON to enter one or more paths, e.g. to the Blueprint repo and to a non-existent directory. You can use variable substitutions. For example, in my settings.json I added "search.additionalRoots": ["${env:HOME}/test/", "/repo/${env:USER}/theia-blueprint"].
3. Use the Search-In-Workspace widget and the File-Search (ctrl+p) menu with various terms and filenames. You should observe entries from both the Theia and Blueprint repos; the presence of a non-existent directory should not cause any errors.

Review checklist

• As an author, I have thoroughly tested my changes and carefully followed the review guidelines

** Note: I haven't tested on Windows or Mac.

Reminder for reviewers

• As a reviewer, I agree to behave in accordance with the review guidelines

[vince-fugnitto]

@gbodeen speaking offline with @colin-grant-work, I believe in order for the pull-request to work well, we might need some variable resolution in settings.json. I'm not sure that setting absolute paths will work well in the workspace scope as this is usually checked-in to the repo, and will not work for other users.

[gbodeen]

@gbodeen speaking offline with @colin-grant-work, I believe in order for the pull-request to work well, we might need some variable resolution in settings.json. I'm not sure that setting absolute paths will work well in the workspace scope as this is usually checked-in to the repo, and will not work for other users.

OK, I'll take a look soon.

[gbodeen]

@vince-fugnitto Variable resolution is added now.

[alvsan09]

I have tested the following, and it works as expected 👍

• Search of files (ctrl+p) within the folder of the additionalRoots
• Search in workspace results include files withing the configured additionalRoots

The code looks good to me as well,
Thanks !!

[vince-fugnitto]

@gbodeen do you mind rebasing the pull-request, I can take a final look afterwards :)

[gbodeen]

@gbodeen do you mind rebasing the pull-request, I can take a final look afterwards :)

Downstream, we've decided on a different approach. Just like there's a little toggle button for searching in ignored files, we've added another button to toggle between searching the workspace roots and searching the git roots. It makes sense for our users, whose workspaces are subdirectories of very large repos.

I'm not sure whether there's a variation on that which would be more generally useful and so suitable for Theia.

[vince-fugnitto]

I'm not sure whether there's a variation on that which would be more generally useful and so suitable for Theia.

@gbodeen sounds good! If you don't feel that the feature is useful in the base framework I think we can close the pr for the moment.