References CodeLens doesn't support methods

[mgood]

The new references CodeLens looks really helpful, but as noted in the PR #933 it doesn't yet support methods (which all show 0 references). I think this could be fixed by adding some information in go-outline to expose the position of the identifier so I'll open another ticket there with more information.

[ramya-rao-a]

The go/parser is used by go-outline to parse the file and get position, and for some reason for structs, the position comes back as expected, but for functions they dont.

If you can take a look at the code there (it is pretty simple) and figure that out, it would be great!

If not, then we can use regex from our side and figure out the right position before creating the codelens

[mgood]

I've added a proof-of-concept PR for go-outline to add the ranges for the *ast.Ident associated with each declaration, which should provide the necessary information. I began looking at the code for this extension, but the API of GoDocumentSymbolProvider returns vscode.SymbolInformation[] which doesn't have a field for this added info. So it looks like it would probably require GoCodeLensProvider to call documentSymbols directly, and refactoring things a little bit to add this information. I might be able to look at that again a little later but I should probably get back to some normal work for today :)

[ramya-rao-a]

Can you provide a link for your work on go-outline ? A repo maybe?

We should be able to re-use the range property of vscode.SymbolInformation, but I'll be in a much better state to make a statement if I can see what your go-outline returns.

I might be able to look at that again a little later but I should probably get back to some normal work for today :)

Take your time, the next release is atleast 2 or 3 weeks out :)

[mgood]

The PR is ramya-rao-a/go-outline#1 (it also shows up on this Github discussion since I referred back to this issue from the PR).

[mgood]

I'm still learning the VSCode API, but from what I could tell the SymbolInformation returned by the GoDocumentSymbolProvider is used to select the range to highlight, so that should still be the entire code block. But somewhere in the symbol provider it could also expose the identifier position in order to look up the references.

[mgood]

But yes, please let me know if you have any suggestions once you've had a change to take a look at the PR.

[ramya-rao-a]

@mgood Your changes to go-outline changes the output and that may affect other users of the tool.

May has been a busy month for me, I wanted to spend more time understanding the parser and how it works.

So for now, to fix the current issue with the codelens, I have pushed a fix from the extension's side. See efa448f

I'll keep your PR open and circle back to it later as that is the real fix and my fix above is just a band aid on the real problem :)