missing one place to see all elements inherited from parent classes

[dkutac]

Type: Feature Request

When a class inherits from multiple other classes, there is no single view that would list all class elements (propertie, method, indices etc...) and their origin. This is very useful if project has more complex hirearchy that just a few classes. There is such feature in old legacy Studio, and it woul be very good to have it in VSCode, too.

Extension version: 3.0.4
VS Code version: Code 1.102.1 (7adae6a56e34cb64d08899664b814cf620465925, 2025-07-15T16:41:17.147Z)
OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631
Modes:

[isc-bsaviano]

@dkutac Can you provide a screenshot of what this looks like in Studio, or how you'd want it to look in VS Code? This is already possible using the Override Class Members... command contributed by the Language Server extension:

[dkutac]

yes, Override Class Members... offers similar functionality, but it's not doing the same. In Studio, the feature is called Class Browser, and attached screenshot shows it.

[isc-bsaviano]

That is very close to what we have in Override Class Members.... If that command is missing information that you think is important then I would rather consider an enhancement for it than introduce something very similar.

[dkutac]

another view, this time more graphical

the point is, that you can client any element and Studio will open the class that defines this element and points you at element directly in the code editor

[ondrejhoferek]

Just to add a perspective from the user/developer side: the purpose of the "Override Class Members..." feature is specifically to facilitate overriding members in a subclass.

In contrast, the Studio Inspector/Class Browser is focused on exploring available class members and navigating to their definitions — even when there is no intent to override.

In VS Code, this exploratory functionality is typically handled by the Outline view, and in many other languages, this view includes inherited members to provide a complete picture of the class structure.

It would make sense to follow the same approach in the ObjectScript extension — by extending the Outline view to also display inherited members, making navigation and code understanding more efficient and consistent with other language experiences in VS Code.

[gjsjohnmurray]

@dkutac have you tried this extension?

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=georgejames.objectscript-class-view

[dkutac]

@gjsjohnmurray this looks promising, I was not aware of it. let me try this together with customer who has really complex classes.

[isc-bsaviano]

The Outline view is the wrong place for this information. It presents an outline of symbols in the current document. Inherited class members are by definition not in the opened class. I can see how this might be useful, but creating a giant table UI for this in VS Code is not easy and would probably not integrate well with the rest of the UI.

[dkutac]

@gjsjohnmurray this looks promising, I was not aware of it. let me try this together with customer who has really complex classes.

@gjsjohnmurray , spoke with a customer who has a large project with complex classes. He liked your extension, but he found some limitations given the way it presents information per class. as he has cases where a class inherits easily from around 20 classes }and each of these again inherits from some 2-5 other classes - yes, there are people doing crazy things), it is not displaying individual elements conveniently together as legacy Studio did.

[isc-bsaviano]

@dkutac I'm going to leave this open so the community can weigh in. The Class Browser is not something we'd be likely to implement, but the Class View tree view looks more doable.

[isc-bsaviano]

I fired up my Windows VM with Studio on it. The "Class View" is equivalent to VS Code's Outline in that it only shows members defined in the current class, not inherited ones. If we were to bring functionality like "Class Browser" into VS Code, it would be in a tree structure because VS Code's API makes those easy to work with.