New classes no longer getting class name based on path

[radical-sam]

I noticed a few weeks back that new classes created in VS Code are no longer getting the class name auto-generated. I decided to get to the bottom of it today and notice that it works if I downgrade this extension to the previous version 3.2.0, so it appears that version 3.4.0 may have a bug (the other two extensions I'm running latest published versions).

Are you using client-side or server-side editing?: Client-side

• VS Code Version: Version: 1.109.2 (user setup)
• Extension Version: 3.4.0
• OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.19045
• Server $ZVERSION (if applicable): IRIS for Windows (x86-64) 2025.1.2 (Build 374U) Wed Oct 15 2025 14:31:14 EDT

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Create a fresh project folder structure on the local file system for a VS Code project like MyProject/src/MyPackage/Msg/Entity
2. Open MyProject folder in VS Code
3. Right-click Entity and create a file called Item.cls
4. Behold, the class name is no longer auto-populated based on the folder structure...

Class Extends %RegisteredObject
{
//
}

I would expect the behaviour to be the same as previous versions...

Class MyPackage.Msg.Entity.Item Extends %RegisteredObject
{
//
}

[isc-bsaviano]

Hi @radical-sam, I see you are now aware that this was an intentional change. The previous behavior was buggy and rested on false assumptions. Like you said, most client-side editors rarely export once they have their workspace set up. Without some settings telling us how to generate the name we can't do it reliably. However, very few users poke around the settings to see what might benefit them so we'd still get bug reports about incorrectly generated names. To avoid those issues, we decided to insert a snippet of a well-formed class definition instead. The cursor is positioned in the right location, so all the user has to do is type the class name. Not ideal, but not buggy and there's no chance of a bad class name being synced to the server causing a mess.

[radical-sam]

Hi @radical-sam, I see you are now aware that this was an intentional change. The previous behavior was buggy and rested on false assumptions. Like you said, most client-side editors rarely export once they have their workspace set up. Without some settings telling us how to generate the name we can't do it reliably. However, very few users poke around the settings to see what might benefit them so we'd still get bug reports about incorrectly generated names. To avoid those issues, we decided to insert a snippet of a well-formed class definition instead. The cursor is positioned in the right location, so all the user has to do is type the class name. Not ideal, but not buggy and there's no chance of a bad class name being synced to the server causing a mess.

Ok, understood. Would you consider giving us a configuration setting to enable the old behaviour? It was certainly a time saver.

[isc-bsaviano]

Hi @radical-sam, I'm not going to restore this behavior with the previous buggy mechanism. I appreciate that this feature was valuable when it worked, so I'll see if I can come up with a more reliable mechanism for generating a document name. We have an mapping of existing files to their document names, so maybe I can leverage that to identify the pattern. That won't work for empty workspaces though. If this did work I wouldn't make it configurable; the generated name would become a default value for the snippet so the user could sill replace it before saving if they wanted.

[isc-bsaviano]

Hi @radical-sam, I've opened a PR with my attempt to bring this feature back with a new mechanism. You can test it out by downloading this zip file and installing the contained VSIX. I am looking forward to your feedback.

vscode-objectscript-3.4.1-dev.1718.vsix.zip

[radical-sam]

Hi @radical-sam, I've opened a PR with my attempt to bring this feature back with a new mechanism. You can test it out by downloading this zip file and installing the contained VSIX. I am looking forward to your feedback.

vscode-objectscript-3.4.1-dev.1718.vsix.zip

Thanks for looking at this. I've tried that version, but I couldn't get it to generate a class name. I also tried exporting a class first, but no luck. What triggers it to determine the part of the file path to ignore? Anything I can do to debug it?

[isc-bsaviano]

Hi @radical-sam, here's what the code does:

• Determines the workspace folder that the newly created uri is in
• Gets the index of known InterSystems documents in that workspace folder
• Iterates over the index looking for a document who's URI has the same prefix as the target URI (for example, target is /wsFolder/abc/def/g.cls and known URI is /wsFolder/abc/def/foo.cls or /wsFolder/abc/bar.mac).
• If a match is found, check the document name against the URI path. If it matches the end of the path, capture the leading path segments that don't contribute to the document name. Then strip them off the target URI's path. What you have left is the document name. If the match's document name and URI patch don't relate to each other in this way, keep going.

Does your workspace folder have at least one document that matches these criteria in it? If not then there's isn't enough information for me to infer the name.

[isc-bsaviano]

Here's a version with the same functional code as above, but with a ton of debugging code that will write to ObjectScript Output channel. This might help identify the issue.

vscode-objectscript-3.4.1-SNAPSHOT.vsix.zip

[radical-sam]

Today I opened VS Code and opened my project from Open Recent menu and the version I tested yesterday is working like magic. I had restarted the extension, but I had not re-opened my workspace yesterday, thought I swear I'd restarted VS Code, I could have been mistaken.

[isc-bsaviano]

Thanks for checking @radical-sam! I'm glad this is working for you.

[isc-solon]

Related issue: Right after starting VS Code, in an empty workspace with an empty folder (src/Test, for example), create a new class Dummy.cls. Nothing at all defaults into the code window.

[isc-bsaviano]

@isc-solon No content is being filled in because this extension hasn't been activated yet. If you click on the InterSystems activity bar icon it should force the extension to activate.