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T O P I C    R E V I E W
CliffyP Posted - Aug 21 2025 : 12:45:59 PM
I realized a simple way to improve the usefulness of Find References.

Take this picture for example:




The leftmost text in the brackets shows what I'm doing find refs on. Why is that inline? I don't need to see that inline as its obviously the same for all entries. That should just be shown only at the top of the window.

Also notice how there are multiple functions of the same name listed. These are not overloads. These references are from different classes Main functions. The only hint the results list gives of it being from different classes are the per-file groupings, but in this case they are all in the same file as it is the case that you can implement multiple classes in a single cpp file.

So what it needs to show inline is the qualifier of the function, as in MyClass::MyFunction instead of just MyFunction.

If it doesn't have a qualifier and is a global scope function then just show the file name inline for it.

In this way the find refs results list would be way more useful as then you can see at a glance specifically what the reference are instead of having to click through each of them...
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feline Posted - Aug 22 2025 : 05:21:23 AM
Which IDE and version of VA are you using?

Which language are you working in? The "->" makes me think C++, but I am not getting anything in square brackets when I run a quick Find References here. Can you post a screen shot of your Find References Results context menu / mouse right click menu. This will tell me which options you have On and which ones you have Off, so I can set the same settings here.

Since I don't know what is going on here, I have created the following test case. I have set the header file to have:

class FindInsideMain
{
public:
	bool FindPackageFile(std::string strFileName) { return false; }
};
	
class HoldsMain1
{
	void Main();
};
	
class HoldsMain2
{
	void Main();
};
	
class HoldsMain3
{
	void Main();
};
	
class HoldsMain4
{
	void Main();
};

and the cpp file to hold:

void HoldsMain1::Main()
{
	FindInsideMain *pFindTarget = new FindInsideMain;
	pFindTarget->FindPackageFile("class HoldsMain1");
}
	
void HoldsMain2::Main()
{
	FindInsideMain *pFindTarget = new FindInsideMain;
	pFindTarget->FindPackageFile("class HoldsMain2");
}
	
void HoldsMain3::Main()
{
	FindInsideMain *pFindTarget = new FindInsideMain;
	pFindTarget->FindPackageFile("class HoldsMain3");
}
	
void HoldsMain4::Main()
{
	FindInsideMain *pFindTarget = new FindInsideMain;
	pFindTarget->FindPackageFile("class HoldsMain4");
}

I am using VS2022 and VA 2568.0, and this is what I see in Find References Results



If you have enabled tooltips you can get more context when hovering the mouse over each result. Here I agree that not showing the fully qualified function name is unclear, but multiple classes with the same, non overloaded function name in the same file isn't something you expect to see that often.

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