SOSL Query builder (enhancement request)

[René Görgens]

Hi Scott,

There is excellent support for building/validating SOQL queries in IC but none for SOSL unless I’ve missed something.

Arguably, SOQL is used in every application to interact with the database, whereas the use cases for SOSL are fewer. Still it’s a key feature of the Lightning platform. How do you see this, is there a chance this could be somewhere in the IC roadmap?

In my view, this would be a major enhancement of the IC feature set.

Thanks in advance.

[Scott Wells]

I’ll certainly be happy to use this enhancement request to gauge interest, but in the time I’ve worked on IC2 I’ve had perhaps one other person ask about a first-class interface for SOSL so it’s remained pretty far down on the backlog. Let’s see if others are more interested than I’ve seen in the past.

[René Görgens]

Thanks for the feedback, I understand that not many people have requested it yet.

• I’d like to do a poll on LinkedIn to gauge the interest, that would be interesting wouldn’t it?

Looking further into the subject:

• Developer Console is able to execute SOSL, however:

  • No syntax highlighting, OST support, …
  • This is what the Trailhead unit Write SOSL Queries recommends doing.
  • From the perspective of using IDEA/IC, a workaround

• Workbench is able to execute SOSL, however:

  • Not an official product and currently dysfunctional: “UNKNOWN ERROR: SOAP-ERROR: Encoding: object has no 'uiRequestId' property” after authentication
  • It doesn’t seem to have syntax highlighting
  • From the perspective of using IDEA/IC, a workaround

• Plugins for VScode supporting SOQL

  • Salesforce Extensions: SOQL in beta, doesn’t seem to support SOSL yet
  • Salesforce Query Editor: claims to emulate “Query Editor Tab in the Salesforce Developer Console”, this would include SOSL
  • These may have syntax highlighting
  • From the perspective of using IDEA/IC, a workaround

• SFDX has a SOSL plugin

  • https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mshanemc/sfdx-sosl
  • I haven’t checked if it’s distributed by default in sfdx

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[René Görgens]

Hi Scott,

In 2.3.0.1 release notes, you mention SOSL: “Starting with this build, feature boundaries are very well-defined. Features include things like language and file type support (Apex/SOQL/SOSL, static resources, Flow, CSS/JavaScript extensions, SAQL, DataWeave, etc.), presentation tier framework support (Visualforce, Aura, LWC), external tool integrations (Salesforce DX, PMD, licensing, etc.), and more.”

• That refers to inline SOSL support not a first-class interface in query builder right?

Btw, formerly release notes were saved under Scratches and Consoles, this stopped working somewhere in the 2.2.8.x range I think. Not important as they’re easily accessible on the web, but I was just curious if a conscious decision.

• Settings > Plugins > IC2 > What’s New (latest)
• Settings > Plugins > IC2 > Documentation > Announcements

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[Scott Wells]

Yes, that mention of SOSL is the Apex/SOQL/SOSL language/grammar support that has been in place since IC 1.0. It doesn’t imply any new SOSL-related functionality.

Regarding release notes, originally it was required to create a scratch HTML file with the release notes so that they could be shown after update, though that had several issues including the resulting browser not properly respecting the IDE’s theme. JetBrains added an API to the SDK that allowed HTML content to be shown without having to create a physical file, and the resulting browser view wasn’t subject to those same issues. I switched to that which is why you don’t see a scratch file any longer.

[Scott Wells]

Duplicate of #364.