Visual assistant for Global-to-Table mapping (similar to InterSystems Studio)

[lucasaguiarsimoes]

The legacy InterSystems Studio provides a very useful visual assistant for mapping Globals to SQL Tables, allowing developers to create, inspect and maintain these mappings in a graphical way.

Currently, when using VSCode with the vscode-objectscript extension, we could not find any equivalent feature. All mapping work must be done manually via code, which makes it harder to:

• Quickly understand existing global/table mappings;
• Maintain legacy systems;
• Migrate teams that previously relied on Studio.

My propose here is to add a visual panel / window / assistant in VSCode that allows developers to:

• View which globals are mapped to which tables;
• Navigate between Global ↔ Table ↔ Class;
• Inspect and possibly edit mapping properties (columns, keys, indexes, etc.).

It does not need to replicate Studio’s UI exactly, but providing a visual alternative would significantly improve productivity.

I believe this feature is still heavily used in real-world projects that rely on SQL over globals, and its absence in VSCode is currently one of the main blockers for fully replacing Studio.

If a similar feature already exists and we missed it, please let me know.

[isc-bsaviano]

Hi @lucasaguiarsimoes, thanks for reporting this. This feature was not included because we figured that everyone who had legacy globals that they needed to map to a class will have done so by now. The Language Server extension provides hover and completion assistance in Storage blocks, which Studio did not have. If you attach screenshots of specific UI elements that you think are helpful for maintaining these legacy constructs then I can talk to the other maintainers about adding the feature. I can't promise that we will implement it though.

[lucasaguiarsimoes]

Hi @isc-bsaviano , thank you for your quick answer.
Most of our legacy tables indeed are already mapped. However, we have situations like:

• New features that require changes (creating/editing columns, including COS code-calculated columns, for example);
• Legacy Globals that have existed for a long time, that we create the corresponding tables on demand, when it becomes useful to read them using SQL;
• Less common, but in some cases we used specific global mapping fields, such as the "Row Reference" field, to create a table that behaves like a UNION between 2 tables. By the way, for that, documentation like this was very helpful: https://community.intersystems.com/post/art-mapping-globals-classes-1-3;

So, it is still very common for us to change global mappings for different reasons, and having this feature available in VSCode would be very helpful.

[isc-bsaviano]

Thanks for the details. I'll discuss this with the other maintainers and get back to you.