Expand all locations when using Find All References

[Hau-Hau]

Hi,

There is no option to set alwaysExpand for References view.

To achieve this goal it is needed to:

• Add new setting in ./extensions/references-view
• Replace hardcoded vscode.TreeItemCollapsibleState.Collapsed with value from settings

Edit I have tested changes locally and created PR. Regarding implementation - I have set alwaysCollapse as default value to keep default behaviour consistent with current one.

Also worth mentioning is that this or very similar functionality has been requested long time ago by multiple people; e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/4333, https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/104548

[jrieken]

Yeah, that's because we would need to load/open each file in order to expand it (we show a real textual preview) and that could be quite expensive

[Hau-Hau]

Is there anything specific what do you recommend to solve this problem?

My proposition is to handle it in same way as in Search view. By that I mean to create one more option called "auto" which would expand files with less than 10 results. So in result would be three options: auto, alwaysCollapse, alwaysExpand.

For last two days I was working with custom build of References view in which alwaysExpand option is enabled by default and I didn't found any performance issues. I'm not saying that it is not a problem, just wanted to highlight that this options is useful and users should have at least possibility to decide.

[ds614]

@Hau-Hau, could you please tell me how to view your PR? I am interested in trying your changes locally. Thanks!

[Hau-Hau]

Hi @ds614, you will find PR under this link: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/197594

Also, if you would like to hardcode "expanded" state without rebuilding vscode and all of that troubles you can directly override extension.js. For Windows I'm using this command:

(Get-Content "C:\Users\$($env:UserName)\AppData\Local\Programs\Microsoft VS Code\resources\app\extensions\references-view\dist\extension.js") -replace '.Collapsed', '.Expanded' | Set-Content "C:\Users\$($env:UserName)\AppData\Local\Programs\Microsoft VS Code\resources\app\extensions\references-view\dist\extension.js"

However, it is a bit annoying approach as after every vscode update, this file is regenerated to original form.

[ds614]

That's very helpful, thanks so much!

[ds614]

And by the way... I agree with you that I don't see what harm there would be in having this as a setting that defaults to the old "collapsed" behavior. 🤷‍♂️

[aguynamedben]

+1. The setting could be a configurable limit. For example, the option could called referencesExpandResultsFileLimit which defaults to 1 but it could be set to 10 if you're okay with the performance trade.