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Ephemeral quick query editor

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#619 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
typescript, vscode
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by inspecting the existing quick query implementation introduced in #210 and the query history view, then review VS Code webview views. The work is done when quick queries run from an ephemeral editor with CodeQL checking and syntax highlighting, can be reopened from query history with their text, and no longer depend on hidden files on disk.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement VSCode

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When we added the quick query feature in #210, we had to stick within the confines of what was possible in VS Code at the time. This made the result a little less slick-feeling than the equivalent QL4E functionality: Quick queries are genuine files on disk, but in an obscure directory; this means they are stateful, and don't interact as well with repeated quick-query executions as QL4E's ephemeral design.

Describe the solution you'd like
With the advent of webview views, I think it's now possible do get feature-parity with Eclipse. We could create a "quick query" view which effectively consists of a large textarea that does CodeQL error checking and syntax highlighting in the context of the active database and workspace (meaning that the active database determines the language, and the qlpacks from the workspace are on the search path, like normal). We can then execute quick queries by passing the content of that text area to the query server, rather than by writing it to disk and passing a path.

The main benefit this unlocks is in conjunction with the query history view: If I double-click on a query execution that corresponds to a quick query, I want the quick query view to open, populated with the QL code that corresponds to the execution I double-clicked on. (We have support for looking at the QL text of existing query executions, but that goes via a slightly awkward readonly editor.)

A side benefit is the removal of the hidden quick-queries directory deep in the workspace, and any pretense that quick queries live in the filesystem, should appear in the outline, should be allowed to have QLLs next to them, and so on.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
539
Forks
240
Avg merge
2d 6h
Merged PRs (30d)
29

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