Now that the Apache Daffodil™ Extension for VSCode v1.3.1 has been officially released, it's time to plan the features for v1.4.0. Here is what the development team is considering:
Data Editor: •Ability to represent data where MSB or LSB bit can be the first bit displayed •Provide a viewports for viewing data as individual bits, different alternative groupings, and bit orderings. •Ability to apply bit masks to data segments •Allow editing at bit offsets within a range of bytes •Continue improving Data profiler MVP •Improve test coverage and cross-platform test automation and support •Highlighting of bytes/bits to track the infoset when debugging •Experimental / Preview of streaming transforms •Togglable views between logical view and data view only •Multi-Character detection •Byte Order Maker (BOM) detection •User configurable viewport geometries (bytes per row, number of rows) •Ability to navigate to relative byte indexes (e.g., seek 20 bytes from here, seek –42 from here) •Ability to reframe viewports on a selected byte •Ability to write a selection to file •Improvements to handle different screen sizes IntelliSense & DFDL Diagnostics: •Add hover functionality to display the attributes available to specific tags •Add unit tests for specific tag attribute suggestions and closing tag completions •Integrated help / Tooltips (link to specific elements in the DFDL Specification) •Additional refinements to autocompletion •Open/close tag matching, highlight both tags or jump between •Diagnostic reporting (semantic and syntactic checks) •Auto format/reformat •Convert IntelliSense client to a server •Update matrix spreadsheet based on feedback from Daffodil Users •Ability to pull in user defined functions •More complete support for XPath validation and autocompletion Debugger: •Add visual indication within daffodil layers •Provide better feedback on what happens when the session or debugger stops •Ability to have several launch configurations, clone them, copy to each one, and continue updating •Infoset diff views should update properly •Add a method to see dfdlx:trace messages •Support for using extension offline for air-gapped and locked down environments* •Improve test coverage and cross-platform test automation and support •Use Daffodil as a schema completion service TDML: •Integrate TDML JAXB bindings into Daffodil •Create an interface for creation/modification of TDML test cases •Integrate execution of TDML test cases into VSCode's Run/Debug sidebar •Allow users to zip/unzip TDML archives •Allow recording of stack traces from a failed Daffodil Parse into a TDML file Additional Goals: •Integrate TDML JAXB bindings into Daffodil •Create an interface for creation/modification of TDML test cases •Integrate execution of TDML test cases into VSCode's Run/Debug sidebar •Allow users to zip/unzip TDML archives •Allow recording of stack traces from a failed Daffodil Parse into a TDML file •Upgrade dependencies Minimum VSCode version: v1.66.2 (from v1.60.2) The development team has been building and testing the extension using node 14 and 16. The latest version of VSCode uses node 18. For v1.4.0, we need to upgrade to building and testing on node 16 and 18 as some of the dependencies have dropped node 14 support (the current node release is node 20 and the current LTS release is node 18). This means the minimum version of VSCode supported shifts to version 1.66.2 (released March 2022), up from version 1.60.2 (released August 2021). Release target for v1.4.0: November 2023. Progress on v1.4.0 can be tracked here: https://github.com/orgs/apache/projects/259 Of course questions, comments, and feedback are welcome as we embark on this next version of the Apache Daffodil™ extension for VSCode. Thank you!
