Provide pester functions (it, context, describe) in document symbols

[kapilmb]

This provides pester symbols (it, context and describe) for a pester file whenever the server receives a textDocument/documentSymbol request. As such, it allows easier navigation of a pester test file.

[daviwil]

Heh, oh man, perfect timing, I've got an awesome use for this ;)

[nightroman]

Is it something that others can use, too? I am thinking of Invoke-Build and psake task symbols, for example.

[daviwil]

This is great, thanks man!

[daviwil]

Are you reading my mind? I was just about to implement a generic "feature provider" model in certain parts of PSES :)

[daviwil]

@nightroman it will be soon, I'm going to expose functionality like this through the $psEditor model. Possibly even for this week's release :)

[daviwil]

@nightroman by the way, having a built-in task symbols provider would be really nice, would you be interested in contributing one similarly to how Kapil added the Pester symbol provider? What did you have in mind for how you'd use this?

[nightroman]

@daviwil I am not completely sure yet what a symbol provider is. I would like to see it in action at first.

[daviwil]

Ahhh, sorry, it's basically the concept that Kapil added to PSES in this PR: for a given ScriptFile, return SymbolReference instances which mark any special symbols in the file, like Task definitions.

[daviwil]

You'd basically be implementing another class like this that looks for Task instead of Describe, etc:

https://github.com/kapilmb/PowerShellEditorServices/blob/c6271653dce470319384974430ccc36f34cb1e22/src/PowerShellEditorServices/Language/PesterDocumentSymbolProvider.cs

In fact, it'd be mostly a copy/paste job ;)

[nightroman]

In fact, it'd be mostly a copy/paste job ;)

Oh, in that case, count me in!

I am still interested in the API for not built-in stuff, looking forward to 1.3.0.

[kapilmb]

@nightroman When I wrote this I had InvokeBuildin mind but wanted to test the waters first with Pester and if things go well then we could've proceeded with InvokeBuild. An approach similar to that of TabExpansionPlusPlus, such that any module can register their symbols providers would be ideal. But I couldn't think of any modules other than Pester, InvokeBuild and psake that use DSL-like syntax - I am sure there probably are more but I am not aware of them. I wanted an efficient way to navigate Pester test files and the current approach seemed to achieve that with least possible effort. However, with the extensibility model that David will soon be pushing, I think we can move towards the ideal approach sooner rather than later. But as @daviwil has already pointed out, please feel free to add InvokeBuild symbol providers.

[daviwil]

I think just a general task symbol provider might be good enough to support both psake and Invoke-Build since they both use the Task command syntax, but Invoke-Build should also be able to provide its own for anything outside of that.