[QScintilla] Call tip problem

[Paul Kerchen]

Hello All,
I'm using Qscintilla as the text edit control in a JavaScript editor that
I'm writing.  JavaScript is an OO language, so I'm using user lists and
class-specific APIs to get Qscintilla as it stands today to do what I want.
Currently, I can get the proper code-completion and call tip behavior that I
need for reasonably complex expressions.  For example, typing
'foo.bar.baz.process()' gives correct code completion options at each '.'
and the correct call tip when the opening parenthesis is typed.  Here's a
simplified code snippet that shows what I'm doing to get the proper call
tips based on the context:

   expr = "foo.bar.baz.process(";
   exprType = computeExprType( expr ); // A function I wrote

   // computeExprType() figured out that "foo.bar.baz" is of some known
type, so
   // we tell Qscintilla to use that type's API...
   lexer->setAPIs( getAPIForType(exprType) );

   // ...and then immediately show the call tip.
   textEdit->callTip();
      
   // If 'process' is found in the API associated with exprType, the call
tip for 'process' is shown.

The problem that I've run into is in dealing with slightly more complex
expressions of this form: 'foo.bar.oof().process()' or
'foo.bar[].kablooie()' .  Specifically, when I call callTip() at the point
the user has typed the right-most opening parenthesis, no tip appears, even
though I've given Qscintilla a QsciAPIs with valid function call signatures
in it.  I tracked the problem down to QsciScintilla::contextWords(), which
considers 'oof()' and 'bar[]' to be invalid sequences and therefore returns
an empty word list in either case.  

I don't pretend to understand all the ramifications of changing
contextWords() to deal with this situation, but it seems like it should be
possible to modify it to take this common programming idiom into
consideration.  Or, is this a problem with the JavaScript lexer (since
contextWords() is just using the separators given it by the lexer)?  Would
adding ")." and "]." to the JavaScript lexer's auto completion word
separators do the trick or would that cause other problems?  I would
appreciate any suggestions on the best approach to solving this problem!
Thanks!

Paul