enableLiveAutocompletion documentation does the opposite of what it says

[Ghostbird]

Describe the issue

We've had problems getting auto completion to work for a while now. Today I finally found the cause.

The documentation states that to enable autocompletion you should pass an array of completers as value for enableLiveAutoCompletion in setOptions.

The exact wording is:

Enable live autocomplete. If the value is an array, it is assumed to be an array of completers and will use them instead of the default completers.

After debugging this for a while today I concluded that this is simply not what Ace does. After looking at the code I saw that indeed, the actual implementation is:

enableLiveAutocompletion: {
    set: function(val) {
        if (val) {
            if (!this.completers)
                this.completers = Array.isArray(val)? val: completers;
            // On each change automatically trigger the autocomplete
            this.commands.on('afterExec', doLiveAutocomplete);
        } else {
            this.commands.removeListener('afterExec', doLiveAutocomplete);
        }
    },
    value: false
},

The documentation should instead state:

Enable live autocomplete. If the value is an array, it is assumed to be an array of completers and will use them unless you already have completers set e.g. from enableBasicAutocompletion.

Note: enableBasicAutocompletion has the same logic, however this is completely undocumented. There the documentation should read:

Enable basic autocomplete. If the value is an array, it is assumed to be an array of completers and will use them unless you already have completers set e.g. from enableLiveAutocompletion.

After all this, I actually don't know how I'm supposed to set the completers, so for now I just grab the underlying array pointer and force the extra completers in there. It seems to work, but feels like unnecessary cruelty to the editor, and probably bypasses several set-up side-effects.

Links

https://ajaxorg.github.io/ace-api-docs/interfaces/Ace.EditorOptions.html#enableLiveAutocompletion

[andrewnester]

Released in Ace 1.12.5

[Ghostbird]

Thank you.
From the comments on the commits, I it seems direct direct access to Editor.completers is the intended usage. From the way the API was structured, it seemed to me that this was a “dangerous” shortcut. Many other properties have dedicated get/set functions, but completers one doesn't have any other than these setOptions options.

[nightwing]

The properties that are not meant to be accessed have by outside code start with $ or _