As time goes on I would think that there will be more and more extensions for Azure Data Studio that we will be able to utilize. While that is going to be great, it will also create a challenge, finding the proper extension. This is where the searching capabilities come in handy.
Just as a reminder, to get to the extensions, all you have to do is click the button that is highlighted below.
Let’s take a quick tour of the extensions window. There are three groups that you will see, Enabled, Recommended and Disabled. To the right of the header for each group will also see the number of extensions that are in the group. There is also a search box, we will cover that a bit later. You may notice that some extensions have a star in the upper left corner. When you see this, that extension is being recommended by Azure Data Studio. These are the extensions that you should really consider installing.
Above the groups there is a search box. Once you start typing Azure Data Studio will begin to filter the extensions based on what you type. For example if I am looking for extensions that can help me manage SQL Server Agent jobs I could type the word “jobs” in the box. The extensions will then be filtered as you type. Notice below there are two extensions that have “jo” somewhere in the name or description. In the example below, Palenight Theme is returned by cause of the provider name, JoseRocha. “Jo” is obviously in the first name. The second extension, SQL Server Agent is returned because “jo” is in the description. Microsoft has made this type of searching very easy.
In the upper right hand corner of the extensions window you will see three dots, if you click on that you will see a number of predefined search criteria. The first group in the context menu is about searching. However, there is more you can do here. You can also install extensions, enable and disable all extensions and check for updates to extensions.
Since this post is about searching we will focus our attention on the top portion of this menu. I think the names do a pretty good job of describing what they are going to search on, so no need to really go into that. However, when you do pick on the options, in the search box you will see an entry that starts with an @. This is the criteria Azure Data Studio will search on. In the example below I wanted to see only the extensions that are installed.
You really don’t need to use the menu if you don’t want to. You can type the @ into the search box and a number of options that are not available in the above mentioned menu. There are a number of options that are not in the menu. Such as @builtin, these are the extensions the obviously come installed as part of Azure Data Studio.
Notice that in addition to placing a filter on the extensions, you can also sort the extensions by a number of columns.
If you pick @builtin, you will see that as of the writing of this post, there are 32 extensions installed
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If you click one of the builtin extensions, many of them will have this warning in the documentation for the extension.
I am hoping in the future there are going to a large number of extensions we can pick from. Searching can cut down on the time for us to search for an extension that works with a particular area, like SQL Agent jobs. It can also help us identify what extensions are in need of an update and which extensions are install or disable.
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