Allow search in "Project and External Dependencies"

[skerit]

Suggestion

I'm currently not able to search for something in the (decompiled) external dependencies.

Use Cases

It's very useful for Minecraft modding.

[github-actions]

Hi @skerit, I'm an AI Support assistant here to help with your issue. While the team reviews your request, I wanted to provide some possible tips and documentation that might help you in the meantime.

The Java extension doesn’t yet support full-text search across decompiled dependency sources. You can:

• Open a dependency type via Go to Type (Ctrl+T / Cmd+T) and then search within that file (Ctrl+F / Cmd+F).

This is tracked upstream:

• Issue Support updating classpaths for Maven/Gradle projects #1283 (How to search in java dependencies?) discusses this limitation and notes:
  • “Dependency sources search is currently not supported… Right now, you can do a type search though: Cmd+T/Ctrl+T.”
  URL: How to search in java dependencies ? redhat-developer/vscode-java#1283
• That issue was closed as a duplicate of #1712, which is the main feature request.
  URL: Can't find methods in symbol search redhat-developer/vscode-java#1712

Other references with low confidence

• Issue Fix #112 - Show past release note entries #121 (Improve the source lookup engine): discusses search engine accuracy in java-debug, but not dependency-indexing directly.
  URL: Improve the source lookup engine vscode-java-debug#121

The team will respond to your issue shortly. I hope these suggestions are helpful in the meantime. If this comment helped you, please give it a 👍. If the suggestion was not helpful or incorrect, please give it a 👎. Your feedback helps us improve!

[nightpool]

In my case, it's really important to be able to do full text search, just like I would on my normal code. The linked tickets seem to only be about adding support for searching for method names to the existing cmd-T type search. While that would solve some of my issues, my dependencies often have e.g. string constants, JSON resources, or other full-text items I need to be able to find—not just class names or method names.

It looks like this would maybe require an extension to the language server specification? I'm not sure how e.g. Eclipse and IntelliJ handle this, but they both have this feature.