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Bug 343055

Summary:	[content assist] Code completion filtering on first activation
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Fabio Zadrozny <fabiofz>
Component:	Text	Assignee:	Platform-Text-Inbox <platform-text-inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3	CC:	daniel_megert
Version:	3.6.2	Keywords:	api
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:

Description Fabio Zadrozny

2011-04-16 21:22:40 EDT

Build Identifier: I20100608-0911

I have the following use case in PyDev:

In Python, by convention, methods/attributes starting with '_' should be considered private, so, when a code-completion is requested, they should not be brought, but if the user types the '_' only those should be brought.

E.g.:

Let's say accessing a token 'a' brings completions '_method1' and 'method2', what I want is providing the '_method1' and 'method2' completions but filtering out '_method1' unless '_' is typed (in which case it should filter the other completions).

So, my request is adding that support as an option for the ContentAssist (note that it's not possible to make that work right now as all the PyDev completions must implement ICompletionProposalExtension2 -- if that wasn't the case, the problem wouldn't appear as the completions would be always recomputed at each step).

I was thinking something like:

At org.eclipse.jface.text.contentassist.CompletionProposalPopup.showProposals(boolean), after setting the proposals and before displaying them, check if fContentAssistant implements a new interface IContentAssistantExtension5 with a method 'getFilterOnInitialRequest()', if it does and returns true, call the fFilterRunnable.run().

If this is accepted, I can create a proper patch for it (and would like to get this solved ASAP -- hopefully for 3.7).

Thanks,

Fabio

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1 Dani Megert

2011-04-18 06:12:59 EDT

We want that the user gets a consistent behavior when using content assist in different products which is
- filtering when typing
- get more results when going to the left again with cursor
- filtering again by going to the right again with cursor
- move less relevant proposals (_* in your case) to the end

Hence we don't want to add API that encourages a different workflow.

Having said that, if you don't like that workflow, I think you could simply filter the _* proposals when content assist is invoked the first time. When the user then presses '_' it aborts the completion automatically (that's out of the box behavior). You could register a key and a ICompletionListener listener to detect that case and restart content assist.