Renaming is not possible if file is excluded from `analysis_options`

[FMorschel]

If you have on your analysis_options.yaml the following:

analyzer:
  exclude:
    - "**.g.dart"

When you use build_runner and a file with that ending is created, it is not analyzed (whatever that means besides showing warnings/lints).

That is what I expected but renaming doesn't work - "is outside of project" message. Since this file is still within my project I was not expecting this message but mainly I expected the rename to work.

I'd expect it to allow me to rename if the file is inside any of the original analysis roots, regardless of where excludes and actual contexts are.

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FYI @bwilkerson @DanTup

[DanTup]

Now I think about this more, this might actually be WAI. I first thought we just had a naive check to prevent you accidentally renaming something outside of your project (for example in the Pub Cache!). But now I'm wondering if the index that's used to find references for renaming actually exists for an excluded folder?

I'm also curious about what it is you're trying to rename here - if the declaration is in generated code, would you want to modify it at all? (shouldn't the code generator update it?)

[FMorschel]

In this case, it was a simple propriety I wanted to rename (the screenshot is merely demonstrative) because when generating it I mistyped where it would copy the name for it (forgot an s). There was no need to regenerate it all and I wasn't using watch. I could of course build again but that would take longer than:

• Opening the declaration, fixing there
• Finding the (in this case only three) problems with the vscode workspace search and replacing them there

It would have been even faster with the rename index of course but way slower to run build_runner again.

---

At the very least the message got me confused, if you still want to keep this behaviour we could think of a better message to display here instead.

[DanTup]

Yeah, I think changing the message might be the best thing here. It comes from here:

sdk/pkg/analysis_server/lib/src/services/refactoring/legacy/rename.dart

Lines 147 to 153 in ca540d8

	if (!workspace.containsElement(element)) {
	var message = format(
	"The {0} '{1}' is defined outside of the project, so cannot be renamed.",
	getElementKindName(element2),
	getElementQualifiedName(element2),
	);
	result.addFatalError(message);

If this can easily distinguish between "outside of the analysis roots" and "insert the analysis roots but excluded" it could show a more appropriate message (something like "The {0} '{1}' is defined in an excluded source, so cannot be renamed."?).