(My current) Atom editor Oracle plugins

If you are an Oracle developer and use Atom text editor, here are some extensions that may make your development experience more pleasant.
  • language-oracle
  • build-oracle
  • autocomplete-oracle
  • (experimental/early) plsql-block

language-oracle

This extension aims to provide the syntax highlighting into Atom. It was converted from a text mate bundle back in October 2015, with a few little tweaks here and there since.

To install, open your settings dialog (ctrl+,), go to the Install node and search "language-oracle". The package should come up as the first result, so hit the install button.


(alternatively, from the command line, run: `apm install language-oracle`)

After it's installed, your favourite extensions for Oracle DDL should now be picked up as PL/SQL (Oracle) in the status bar and the keywords and package references should be appropriately styled.



build-oracle

You may recall I blogged about compiling Oracle code back in September 2015. This plugin essentially wraps all the scripts up nicely to get you going quickly.

First, you will want to have the scripting engine installed and available on your system, preferably on your path. For the purpose of this article, I'll just be looking at SQLcl, but SQL*Plus can just as easily be used (and is what I actually have my instance set up with). 

So, head over to the SQLcl downloads page and grab the lastest version: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sqlcl/downloads/index.html

The unzip and store in a convenient location (I store mine in /opt). 


unzip sqlcl-*.zip 
sudo mv sqlcl/ /opt/sqlcl/

The next part is to install the Atom plugin. To install, open your settings dialog (ctrl+,), go to the Install node and search "build-oracle". The package should come up as the first result, so hit the install button.



(alternatively, from the command line, run: `apm install language-oracle`)

By default, the plugin looks for `sqlplus` in the path. Since this example we are going with SQLcl, we need to update the configuration. So go into the plugins settings and specify the path to the SQL interpreter:


Then, in the root of your project folder, you need a file named `.atom-build-oracle.json`, which will be an array of build targets. Each target should contain the fields "connectString" and "targetName".

[
    {
        "targetName" : "hr: dev",
        "connectString" : "hr/hr@//example.com:1521/xe"
    }
] 

The first time you add this file into your project, you will need to reload Atom so it knows to read the file to find targets. Now, in the bottom left of the status bar, you will see all the the first target as defined in your build configuration.



So, I have created a query to test this out (sample.sql). I can hit the keyboard shortcut (ctrl+alt+b), or click on the target in the bottom left to trigger a build. This output then comes out like so:



Easy as!

If you want to use SQL*Plus as the engine, there are some notes on the projects README that you may want to review. See here: https://github.com/tschf/atom-build-oracle/blob/master/README.md

autocomplete-oracle


Atom has an API to add support for code completions. In this package, I've essentially taken a dump of certain bits from the data dictionary into a JSON file.

To install, open your settings dialog (ctrl+,), go to the Install node and search "autocomplete-oracle". The package should come up as the first result, so hit the install button.


(alternatively, from the command line, run: `apm install autocomplete-oracle`)

With this installed, as you type, certain oracle keywords and package references will appear.



(experimental/early) plsql-block


This is one I haven't really done a lot with, and is not technically my project, but borrowed from another language. A while ago, I came across a couple of Ruby packages that give visual indication of where a block starts and ends.

(FWIW, this is a fork of the project: https://github.com/samu/blocky. There was another project that does a similar thing, except only matched when on the ending block, so figured this would be better to base off)

I've done a slight tweak, and out of the box, it works with begin,end blocks. I think the current implementation doesn't work with if, loop statements, so I've disabled the if-block matching implementation for now. If someone has the time to look more into this project, that would be great - as I can this being supremely useful; or maybe stealing the idea's from this project and re-implementing for PL/SQL!

Because it's incomplete for PL/SQL code, I haven't published this - but you can get up and going with this by cloning the fork/repository I have in my GitHub account. Go into your package directory, and clone like so:

cd ~/.atom/packages/
git clone https://github.com/tschf/plsql-block.git
cd plsql-block
apm i

With that installed, you should see it under community packages in Atom:



And, in your PL/SQL code, you will find the opening and closing blocks highlighted like so:


Even without the if, loop, constructs matched, I can imagine this still being quite handy.

..

Enjoy!

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