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Bug 325165

Summary: Node Model Outline
Product: [Modeling] TMF Reporter: Ralf Ebert <ralf>
Component: Xtext BacklogAssignee: Project Inbox <tmf.xtext-inbox>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: miklossy, sven.efftinge
Version: 1.0.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Ralf Ebert CLA 2010-09-13 16:39:29 EDT 
For understanding and debugging Xtext it helps tremendously to see an outline of the node model.
I wrote a plug-in that provides an ISemanticModelTransformer to see such an outline in Xtext 1.x, see http://www.ralfebert.de/blog/xtext/node_outline/
I'd like to improve this and contribute it to Xtext.
Maybe this could be part of an optional "xtext spy" plug-in that allows to see the internals of Xtext.
Jan mentioned an outline redesign: For such a plug-in it would be great to have a hook that allows to contribute additional nodes to all Xtext outlines globally.
Comment 1 Sven Efftinge CLA 2010-09-14 03:01:03 EDT 
I think this really is a useful debugging facility for language designers. That's why I don't see such things in the deployed IDE but would like to have this while debugging a file (i.e. a debugging view). 
We have plans to work on that, but not during this release train.

Anyway, for now we maybe could make your contribution a view (similar to some of the PDE views). It should be part of org.eclipse.xtext.xtext.ui, which is the bundle for language design tooling.
I also would like to be able to see the values (offset, length. grammar element, etc.) of a selected node in a detail part of the view. 

Do you want to work on such a view?
Comment 2 Ralf Ebert CLA 2010-09-14 04:04:14 EDT 
A separate view would be fine if the outline facilities can be reused for this; I'll have a look at it.
Comment 3 Tamas Miklossy CLA 2020-04-26 09:14:40 EDT 
The Xtext Tools project https://github.com/OLibutzki/xtext.tools provides similar functionalities.