DataTable Visualizer
Are you tired of Visual Studio's built-in, modal, slow, unsearchable DataTable Visualizer? Me too! That's why I made my own!
This Visual Studio Extension provides a non-modal, dockable, and searchable DataTable visualizer for Visual Studio. It contains a very powerful text filter that takes either free text, or OData-like queries for fantastic searching! It also makes it really simple to copy and paste the data into Excel if you need to!
To access the visualizer, you must be debugging and stopped at a breakpoint. Click the down arrow while hovering over a DataTable variable and select "ShineTools.DataTableVisualizer". (I made the name different so as not to clash with the crappy built in visualizer)
This is my first extension, so feedback is welcome!
Installation
Run the installer executable*. Once it completes, the VSIX installer will then launch. Run that after closing Visual Studio and it will complete the installation.
*Unfortunately, to install a custom visualizer this extension needs its own installer as it needs to do more than a standard VSIX is capable of. (Visual Studio doesn't directly support custom visualizers in VSIX extensions). The installer writes to the Visual Studio installation folder, registers the visualizer, and recompiles the DLL Visual Studio uses to find extensions (autoexp.cs).
As this is an open-source project, I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars to get a cert to sign the exe, so unfortunately you'll have to ignore Windows warnings. :/ The code, including the installer script is all available on Github so you can verify that it's safe if you're worried.
Instructions
Note: This information is all available from within the grid as a tooltip on the filter icon. In other words, don't worry, you don't have to memorize it to get started.
Type into the box to apply a filter. Either a free-text query that will run a 'contains' match against every column or an OData-like query which can target specific columns.
The filter icon will be orange if a valid OData-like filter is applied, yellow if a contains filter is applied, or empty if no filter is currently applied.
The blue "orb" next to the filter icon indicates the filter string has been changed but not yet applied. Apply a filter by hitting "Enter".
OData-like queries support the following operators: eq, ne, gt, ge, lt, le, and, or, not.
Strings and dates must be single quoted for OData queries. Numbers and booleans should not contain quotes.
All column names and string matches are case-insensitive.
Two special operators are also provided: ct, rx. These are "contains" and "regex", respectively.
ct will turn whatever column it is applied against into a string and run a contains match.
rx will turn whatever column it is applied against into a string and run a regex match, utilizing standard .NET regular expressions.
The following OData functions are also provided: startswith(), endswith(), substringof(), year(), month(), day(), hour(), minute(), second().
Examples
age gt 21
address rx '..00 Pennslyvania Avenue'
uniqueid ct '5def'
DOB lt '1990-01-08'
DOB ne '1990-01-05' or not (Name eq 'Fred')