vscode: migrate settings.json writer to full hujson AST manipulation
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 58/100
Research direction
Start with cmd/modern/root/open/jsonc.go and cmd/modern/root/open/vscode.go to trace the current hujson parsing, profile construction, and update paths. Extend cmd/modern/root/open/jsonc_test.go, including TestApplyJSONCSettingsUpdates_PreservesComments, for add-adjacent and per-connection comments. Done means direct hujson AST updates preserve comments, ordering, and unrelated fields for new and existing profiles.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Background
PR #688 added sqlcmd open vscode, which writes the user's settings.json to register a connection profile. The original implementation stripped JSONC comments and trailing commas, marshaled fresh JSON, and saved the user's original to a .sqlcmd-backup file. dlevy flagged that this clobbers the backup on every subsequent run (e.g. creating a second container loses the first backup) and silently destroys hand-authored comments.
PR #688 follow-up commit replaced the strip-and-marshal round trip with github.com/tailscale/hujson. We now parse the original AST and apply an RFC 6902 patch that touches only the two keys we own (mssql.connections, mssql.connectionGroups). Comments, trailing commas, and unrelated user keys round-trip untouched on replace operations, and the .sqlcmd-backup file is no longer needed.
Remaining limitation
hujson's Patch "add" operation (used when the document doesn't yet have an mssql.connections key) can blank a comment immediately adjacent to the insertion point. Unrelated keys are preserved; only a comment line at the insertion site is affected. This is a one-time event per settings.json (subsequent runs use the "replace" path, which fully preserves comments).
Additionally, createProfile / updateOrAddProfile in cmd/modern/root/open/vscode.go operate on map[string]interface{} for the connection array itself. This means per-connection comments inside mssql.connections[*] are not preserved when sqlcmd updates an existing profile.
Proposed work
Refactor cmd/modern/root/open/jsonc.go and the profile-construction helpers to operate directly on hujson.Value AST nodes instead of decoded maps. Specifically:
- Walk the parsed root
*hujson.Objectto findmssql.connectionsandmssql.connectionGroupsmembers, mutating theirValuein place rather than going through a JSON patch. - For the array of profiles, locate the existing profile member by
idand rewrite its*hujson.Objectfields one at a time, leaving member ordering and surrounding extras intact. - When inserting a new profile or a new top-level key, set
ObjectMember.Name.BeforeExtraexplicitly so the preceding comment isn't absorbed by hujson's leading-comment extraction.
Verification
The round-trip test in cmd/modern/root/open/jsonc_test.go (TestApplyJSONCSettingsUpdates_PreservesComments) should be extended to cover the add-comment-adjacent case, and a new test should verify per-connection comments inside the mssql.connections array survive an update to an existing profile.
References
- PR: #688
- Related review thread: https://github.com/microsoft/go-sqlcmd/pull/688#discussion_r3325235606
- hujson patch semantics: https://github.com/tailscale/hujson/blob/main/patch.go
- Dominant language
- Go
- Stars
- 595
- Forks
- 91
- Avg merge
- 9h 35m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 1
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