[Dltk-dev] Teaching DLTK about third party APIs (for completion)

[Clemens Anhuth <clemens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone.

I have asked a few questions regarding this topic on the newsgroups 
eclipse.technology.dltk, but the low traffic in comparison to this 
mailing list seems to suggest that this is the place, for time the being.



The problem I am trying to solve is this:

I would like to have DLTK offer code completion for third party APIs, 
and in part in a way that is language agnostic, because the APIs are 
offered almost identically for Python, JavaScript and Tcl.

(These APIs are not implemented in any of these script languages. So the 
situation is similar to different extensions in JScript/JavaScript 
depending on whether you use it in Excel or WSH, or Adobe Indesign - 
these "other" APIs are "just there".)



Approach #1:
I can achieve the desired completion functionality in DLTK by adding a 
*.js file to a DLTK JavaScript project, given that the additional *.js 
file contains all type and variable declarations, classes, their 
methods, etc.

Approach #2:
I can also achieve the desired functionality by adding completion 
proposal computers for each language, but I would have to implement 
parsing, etc. myself then, which is what I would want to avoid.



But instead of going through completion proposal or adding an artifical 
"interface declaration file" I would much rather feed the underlying 
data structures directly with the functions, global variables, class, 
methods, etc. myself. I tried stepping into the completion code as well 
as the parsing triggered by AbstractASTFoldingStructureProvider, but 
cannot make much sense of the code.

For now I would be happy with hacking DLTK/JavaScript so that it would 
parse my "interface declaration file" (written in JavaScript) although 
it doesn't appear in the list of project files, but I don't know where 
in the code.

Ultimately I would like to feed directly into the respective DLTK data 
structures to make my declarations without going through the extra step 
of parsing an external file, but, here too, I don't know where in the 
code that would be achieved.


Has teaching third party APIs to DLTK been given any thought yet? Has 
anything been implemented that I could already use right away? How would 
you like to see this implemented (if not done yet)?

Can any of you provide any pointers where to look in the code for either 
of these approaches?



With best regards

Clemens Anhuth



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