Outline

LSP: textDocument/documentSymbol request Legacy: analysis.outline notification

Document symbol is used to get the structure of a file. This information is used, for example, to populate the Outline view and breadcrumbs.

The structural information forms a tree of ‘document symbol’ nodes.

Syntactic or semantic structure?

We take the position that the Outline view is intended to effectively be a table of contents for a file. This is consistent with the way TypeScript uses the view.

This implies that the information shown in the view should be a subset of the information in the file. Another way of saying this is that a document symbol should represent the syntactic structure of the code, not the semantics of the code.

As a result, we choose to return a node for

• top-level declarations, including classes, enums, extensions, extension types, functions, mixins, and top-level variables
• members of top-level declarations, including fields and methods
• augmentations of any of the above
• invocations of the group and test functions from package:test

We do not return nodes for directives or local variables (though we do include parameters as part of the signature of functions and methods in the detail field).