Skill Flow Builder VS Code Language Extension

Warning DEPRECATED The Alexa Games team will no longer support or maintain this official distribution of Skill Flow Builder. Thank you to all the folks who have used SFB to make great Alexa skills over the years!

This module contains the code for the VS Code extension for Skill Flow Builder which provides syntax highlighting for .abc files. You can install it with the Skill Flow Builder CLI using the command alexa-sfb vscode. Using this command will install the Alexa SFB extension into your $HOME/.vscode/extensions/ directory.

Visit Skill Flow Builder on Github for more information.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

The following needs to be installed and configured:

Node.js (with npm) # Note: Requires Node.js version >= 10.15.
Yarn

This package requires other core modules to be built. To build all the modules in the packages/ directory at once, run yarn build-modules. If you have the sfb-cli package globally installed, you can then run alexa-sfb vscode to install the extension. If you do not have the sfb-cli package already installed, please refer to the sfb-cli installation process to get started.

Compiling

yarn install && yarn compile

The compiled code is built into the dist/ directory.

Package Structure

The SFB VS Code extension package structure looks like this.

packages/sfb-vscode-extension/
└── resources/ # SVG graphics
└── src/       # extension code
└── syntaxes/  # abc file syntax highlighting definition
└── language-configuration.json # general formatting config for .abc
└── package.json # contains top-level extension configuration
└── ...

Contributing

For a full guide on building VS Code language extensions, read Language Extensions

The majority of the logic for the VS Code extension is built using regular expressions present in syntaxes/abc-format.tmLanguage.json. If new language features are added as part of sfb-f, such as new keywords or expressions, then an associated regular expression pattern should be added or updated in syntaxes/abc-format.tmLanguage.json as well. For example, the flag manipulation pattern looks like this:

{
  "match": "^[\\s]*(flag|unflag|clear|pop|dequeue)[\\s]+(?:(?:([\\S]+?))(?=,[\\s]*$|\\.[\\s]*$|$))?",
  "captures": {
    "1": {
      "name": "entity.name.function"
    },
    "2": {
      "name": "variable"
    }
  }
}

Here, the match property details the full regular expression pattern, and the captures property assigns TextMate scopes to the tokens matched. Note that any pattern can only match a single line.