Completions

[seb-esser]

A common approach to introducing students to STEP and EXPRESS is to have them author their own instance files against a given EXPRESS schema. Could we provide intelligent auto-completion and cross-reference suggestions to guide them toward valid, schema-conformant instances?

[Finradon]

I think this Issue would be better placed at the IFC-Language-Server repo, as this repository is just an implementation of the LS.

[NepomukWolf]

Moved this issue to the IFC-Language-Server repo.

[Finradon]

@seb-esser I think the following could be achieved within the scope of this project:

• Definitely: Autocompletion of entity names. E.g., I start writing IFCW and autocomplete suggests IFCWALL.
• Maybe: Tooltip showing the attribute names and datatypes when opening the first bracket.
• Definitely not: Using custom EXPRESS schemas as a base. This repository can and will only support a predefined set of schemas (See readme).

What do you say?

[seb-esser]

Providing auto-completion for IFC files would already be a significant step forward. Custom schemas may be important for the broader development of IFC, but are less relevant in the context of teaching activities, because the schemas we are working with are typically small.

[NepomukWolf]

I think the goalposts have shifted slightly, and we are now working on runtime .exp schema parsing. This should enable the use of user-provided schemas in the future.

Regarding functionality, I think in addition to what @Finradon mentioned, it might also be possible to provide autocomplete suggestions for entity references (for example, suggesting the STEP ID associated with the owner history when editing an attribute that references it).

[Finradon]

Relevant tower-lsp documentation for completions:
https://docs.rs/tower-lsp/latest/tower_lsp/trait.LanguageServer.html#method.completion