Dumb-jump not passing control to next item in xref-backend-functions

[karthink]

I have my xref-backend-functions set up as follows:

(dumb-jump-xref-activate buffer-local-xref-activate)

Where buffer-local-xref-activate is a backend I wrote that simply finds the first occurrence in the current buffer of the symbol at point. (It's an even-dumber-jump.)

When I call xref-find-definitions on a symbol, I get "No definitions found for: mySymbol". However when I swap the order and set xref-backend-functions to

(buffer-local-xref-activate dumb-jump-xref-activate)

It correctly moves to the first occurrence of mySymbol in the buffer. This leads me to believe that dumb-jump is not failing gracefully, i.e. not returning nil so that the next function in xref-backend-functions can be run. I tried to verify the return value using edebug but it doesn't work as dumb-jump's searching code is wrapped in a cl-defmethod instead of a defun.

EDIT: I have verified using edebug that when dumb-jump-xref-activate is placed first in xref-backend-functions and dumb-jump fails to find any results, the next backend function is never called.

Aside: The reason dumb-jump is failing in the first place is because the symbol I'm searching for is the name of an org-babel code block in an org-mode buffer, which dumb-jump does not support (best I can tell).

[phikal]

The condition for Dumb Jump's Xref backend to be used isn't that it will find a symbol, but that it could find one: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump/blob/master/dumb-jump.el#L3078

This is a limitation of Xref, at least for now, that it stop searching after it has found one backend, even if it returns no results. This has been discussed on the mailing list before, and the best idea that I played with it to write a backend that combines two existing backends into one.

[karthink]

Thanks, I realize now that `run-hooks-with-args-until-success` stops as soon as one of the backend functions returns a symbol, and not when the corresponding `xref-find-definitions` cl-defmethod returns non-nil. The latter would have made xref much more useful. This seems like an oversight on the part of the xref authors. "Philip K." <notifications@github.com> writes:

…

The condition for Dumb Jump's Xref backend to be used isn't that it _will_ find a symbol, but that it _could_ find one: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump/blob/master/dumb-jump.el#L3078 This is a limitation of Xref, at least for now, that it stop searching after it has found one backend, even if it returns no results. This has been discussed on the mailing list before, and the best idea that I played with it to write a backend that combines two existing backends into one. -- You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #386 (comment)