Improve parameter Intellisense sorting

[rkeithhill]

Right now, command-specific parameters are mixed in with common parameters.

Ideally, I'd love to see VSC support a tabbed Intellisense popup (like I've seen before in VS) where there would be two tabs as shown I the C# popup:

Where the first tab would show the command-specific parameters and the second tab would show common parameters.

If VSC doesn't support this then I propose that the parameters are listed in the following order:

• Sorted non-common parameters
• Line separator (if possible)
• Optional common parmeters
• Line separator (if possible)
• Sort common parameters

For example, this is an example of the above for Stop-Process:

Force
Id
InputObject
Name
PassThru
----
Confirm
WhatIf
----
Debug
ErrorAction
ErrorVariable
InformationAction
InformationVariable
OutBuffer
OutVariable
PipelineVariable
Verbose
WarningAction
WarningVariable

I think this order would be more useful to PowerShell scripters. Personally, I'm almost always more interested in the command-specific parameters.

[rkeithhill]

I looked at this a bit over the weekend. It appears the extension is passing the parameters in the same (non-alpha) order to VSCode that I observe in ISE. VSCode must be sort the list. That's too bad, wish we could suppress that.

[daviwil]

For the JSON protocol there's a 'SortText' field that I haven't been using yet. I bet we'd get the right ordering if we prefix the label text to populate SortText based on the type of parameter. Something like:

1 Force
1 Id
...
----
2 Confirm
2 WhatIf
----
3 Debug
3 ErrorAction
3 ErrorVariable
...

Could also just use an ordered integer converted to a string if you want to completely eliminate the sorting. Check out the CreateCompletionItem method in src\PowerShellEditorServices.Protocol\Server\LanguageServer.cs.

[rkeithhill]

Will do. Thanks.

[rkeithhill]

So just putting an increasing integer converted to string in the SortText field didn't do the trick. Guess I need to read up on the CompletionItem semantics.

[daviwil]

There are docs for the CompletionItem parameters on this page:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensionAPI/vscode-api

sortText should work, but maybe there's a bug? Also filterText looks interesting, I wonder if it can help you do the other idea you had about having different IntelliSense sections.

[rkeithhill]

This has been fixed. The sort order for parameters should be the same as you see in ISE now. This will require an updated VSCode (>= 0.10.7) in order to get the preferred sort order (since there was a bug in VSCode where it ignored the sortText field).