Greetings Daffodil developers and users!
As v1.3.0 of the Apache Daffodil Extension for VS Code has been officially
released, it’s time to plan the next release.
Since v1.3.0 was a huge feature release compared to v1.2.0, I propose that
we do a smaller (e.g., v1.3.1) release *before *we jump into v1.4.0. This
allows for some recovery and implementation of some short-term, but
important improvements, to set the stage for a larger release to follow. Since
1.3.1 can be smaller in scope, let’s try to target a release for August
2023, then a larger one (e.g., v1.4.0) targeted for the fall
(October/November).
Some features that I think would be appropriate for the smaller v1.3.1
release targeted for this summer would include:
Data Editor:
• Merge single and multi-byte modes so they don’t need to be
manually selected, for example, if one byte is selected, then the Data
Editor should be automatically in single byte mode, and if more than one
byte is selected, the Data Editor should automatically switch into
muti-byte editing mode.
• Add support for large file editing in the Data Editor (e.g.,
being able to scroll and search around in large files -
https://github.com/ctc-oss/daffodil-vscode/discussions/95).
• Being able to persist selections *after *the viewport loses focus.
• Implement “Save As” in addition to “Save”.
• Incremental Search and Replace (currently Replace All is
implemented).
• Ability to have multiple simultaneous Data Editors opened sharing
the same backend server (currently only one Data Editor can be opened at
one time).
• Ability to view and edit bytes represented in binary where the
most significant bit can be the first bit of the byte, or the last bit of
the byte.
• Content-type discovery using Apache Tika.
• Initial implementation of a data profiler.
• Allow the values in the data inspector to be editable.
• Have an “overwrite only” mode that will keep the file size the
same, even when performing operations like Search and Replace where the
token sizes aren’t the same.
IntelliSense:
• Add additional/missing attribute completion snippets.
• Refine snippet suggestions for specific element tags.
• Refine the handling of auto-complete closing tags for multi-line
attributes (attribute split on multiple lines).
• Setup IntelliSense unit *test *infrastructure.
• Add semantic highlighting for XPath expressions.
Reply to this thread if there are any other reasonably-small features that
you would like to see implemented in v1.3.1 and/or thoughts about the
release scheduling proposed here.
Work on many of these items is already underway since the release cycle for
v1.3.0 took 4 candidates before it was approved. The development team is
tracking progress on the next release here:
https://github.com/orgs/apache/projects/258/views/1.
Thank you!
