In this article by Denis Patin and Stefan Rosca authors of the book WebStorm Essentials, we are going to deal with a number of really smart features that will enable you to fundamentally change your approach to web development and learn how to gain maximum benefit from WebStorm. We are going to study the following in this article:

• On-the-fly code analysis
• Smart code features
• Multiselect feature
• Refactoring facility

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

On-the-fly code analysis

WebStorm will preform static code analysis on your code on the fly. The editor will check the code based on the language used and the rules you specify and highlight warnings and errors as you type. This is a very powerful feature that means you don’t need to have an external linter and will catch most errors quickly thus making a dynamic and complex language like JavaScript more predictable and easy to use.

Runtime error and any other error, such as syntax or performance, are two things. To investigate the first one, you need tests or a debugger, and it is obvious that they have almost nothing in common with the IDE itself (although, when these facilities are integrated into the IDE, such a synergy is better, but that is not it). You can also examine the second type of errors the same way but is it convenient? Just imagine that you need to run tests after writing the next line of code. It is no go! Won’t it be more efficient and helpful to use something that keeps an eye on and analyzes each word being typed in order to notify about probable performance issues and bugs, code style and workflow issues, various validation issues, warn of dead code and other likely execution issues before executing the code, to say nothing of reporting inadvertent misprints. WebStorm is the best fit for it. It performs a deep-level analysis of each line, each word in the code. Moreover, you needn’t break off your developing process when WebStorm scans your code; it is performed on the fly and thus so called:

WebStorm also enables you to get a full inspection report on demand. For getting it, go to the menu: Code | Inspect Code. It pops up the Specify Inspection Scope dialog where you can define what exactly you would like to inspect, and click OK. Depending on what is selected and of what size, you need to wait a little for the process to finish, and you will see the detailed results where the Terminal window is located:

You can expand all the items, if needed. To the right of this inspection result list you can see an explanation window. To jump to the erroneous code lines, you can simply click on the necessary item, and you will flip into the corresponding line.

Besides simple indicating where some issue is located, WebStorm also unequivocally suggests the ways to eliminate this issue. And you even needn’t make any changes yourself—WebStorm already has quick solutions, which you need just to click on, and they will be instantly inserted into the code:

Smart code features

Being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and tending to be intelligent, WebStorm provides a really powerful pack of features by using which you can strongly improve your efficiency and save a lot of time.

One of the most useful and hot features is code completion. WebStorm continually analyzes and processes the code of the whole project, and smartly suggests the pieces of code appropriate in the current context, and even more—alongside the method names you can find the usage of these methods. Of course, code completion itself is not a fresh innovation; however WebStorm performs it in a much smarter way than other IDEs do. WebStorm can auto-complete a lot things: Class and function names, keywords and parameters, types and properties, punctuation, and even file paths.

By default, the code completion facility is on. To invoke it, simply start typing some code. For example, in the following image you can see how WebStorm suggests object methods:

You can navigate through the list of suggestions using your mouse or the Up and Down arrow keys. However, the list can be very long, which makes it not very convenient to browse. To reduce it and retain only the things appropriate in the current context, keep on typing the next letters. Besides typing only initial consecutive letter of the method, you can either type something from the middle of the method name, or even use the CamelCase style, which is usually the quickest way of typing really long method names:

It may turn out for some reason that the code completion isn’t working automatically. To manually invoke it, press Control + Space on Mac or Ctrl + Space on Windows.

To insert the suggested method, press Enter; to replace the string next to the current cursor position with the suggested method, press Tab. If you want the facility to also arrange correct syntactic surroundings for the method, press Shift + ⌘ + Enter on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + Enter on Windows, and missing brackets or/and new lines will be inserted, up to the styling standards of the current language of the code.

Multiselect feature

With the multiple selection (or simply multiselect) feature, you can place the cursor in several locations simultaneously, and when you will type the code it will be applied at all these positions. For example, you need to add different background colors for each table cell, and then make them of twenty-pixel width. In this case, what you need to not perform these identical tasks repeatedly and save a lot of time, is to place the cursor after the <td> tag, press Alt, and put the cursor in each <td> tag, which you are going to apply styling to:

Now you can start typing the necessary attribute—it is bgcolor. Note that WebStorm performs smart code completion here too, independently of you typing something on a single line or not. You get empty values for bgcolor attributes, and you fill them out individually a bit later. You need also to change the width so you can continue typing. As cell widths are arranged to be fixed-sized, simply add the value for width attributes as well. What you get in the following image:

Moreover, the multiselect feature can select identical values or just words independently, that is, you needn’t place the cursor in multiple locations. Let us watch this feature by another example. Say, you changed your mind and decided to colorize not backgrounds but borders of several consecutive cells. You may instantly think of using a simple replace feature but you needn’t replace all attribute occurrences, only several consecutive ones. For doing this, you can place the cursor on the first attribute, which you are going to perform changes from, and click Ctrl + G on Mac or Alt + J on Windows as many times as you need. One by one the same attributes will be selected, and you can replace the bgcolor attribute for the bordercolor one:

You can also select all occurrences of any word by clicking Ctrl + command + G on Mac or Ctrl + Alt + Shift + J.

To get out of the multiselect mode you have to click in a different position or use the Esc key.

Refactoring facility

Throughout the development process, it is almost unavoidable that you have to use refactoring. Also, the bigger code base you have, the more difficult it becomes to control the code, and when you need to refactor some code, you can most likely be up against some issues relating to, examples. naming omission or not taking into consideration function usage. You learned that WebStorm performs a thorough code analysis so it understands what is connected with what and if some changes occur it collates them and decide what is acceptable and what is not to perform in the rest of the code. Let us try a simple example.

In a big HTML file you have the following line:

<input id="search" type="search" placeholder="search" />

And in a big JavaScript file you have another one:

var search = document.getElementById('search');

You decided to rename the id attribute’s value of the input element to search_field because it is less confusing. You could simply rename it here but after that you would have to manually find all the occurrences of the word search in the code. It is evident that the word is rather frequent so you would spend a lot of time recognizing usage cases appropriate in the current context or not. And there is a high probability that you forget something important, and even more time will be spent on investigating an issue. Instead, you can entrust WebStorm with this task. Select the code unit to refactor (in our case, it is the search value of the id attribute), and click Shift + T on Mac or Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T on Windows (or simply click the Refactor menu item) to call the Refactor This dialog. There, choose the Rename… item and enter the new name for the selected code unit (search_field in our case). To get only a preview of what will happen during the refactoring process, click the Preview button, and all the changes to apply will be displayed in the bottom. You can walk through the hierarchical tree and either apply the change by clicking the Do Refactor button, or not. If you need a preview, you can simply click the Refactor button. What you will see is that the id attribute got the search_field value, not the type or placeholder values, even if they have the same value, and in the JavaScript file you got getElementById(‘search_field’).

Note that even though WebStorm can perform various smart tasks, it still remains a program, and there can occur some issues caused by so-called artificial intelligence imperfection, so you should always be careful when performing the refactoring. In particular, manually check the var declarations because WebStorm sometimes can apply the changes to them as well but it is not always necessary because of the scope.

Of course, it is just a little of what you are enabled to perform with refactoring. The basic things that the refactoring facility allows you to do are as follows:

The elements in the preceding screenshot are explained as follows:

• Rename…: You have already got familiar with this refactoring. Once again, with it you can rename code units, and WebStorm automatically will fix all references of them in the code. The shortcut is Shift + F6.
• Change Signature…: This feature is used basically for changing function names, and adding/removing, reordering, or renaming function parameters, that is, changing the function signature. The shortcut is ⌘ + F6 for Mac and Ctrl + F6 for Windows.
• Move…: This feature enables you to move files or directories within a project, and it simultaneously repairs all references to these project elements in the code so you needn’t manually repair them. The shortcut is F6.
• Copy…: With this feature, you can copy a file or directory or even a class, with its structure, from one place to another. The shortcut is F5.
• Safe Delete…: This feature is really helpful. It allows you to safely delete any code or entire files from the project. When performing this refactoring, you will be asked about whether it is needed to inspect comments and strings or all text files for the occurrence of the required piece of code or not. The shortcut is ⌘ + delete for Mac and Alt + Delete for Windows.
• Variable…: This refactoring feature declares a new variable whereto the result of the selected statement or expression is put. It can be useful when you realize there are too many occurrences of a certain expression so it can be turned into a variable, and the expression can just initialize it. The shortcut is Alt +⌘ + V for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + V for Windows.
• Parameter…: When you need to add a new parameter to some method and appropriately update its calls, use this feature. The shortcut is Alt + ⌘ + P for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + P for Windows.
• Method…: During this refactoring, the code block you selected undergoes analysis, through which the input and output variables get detected, and the extracted function receives the output variable as a return value. The shortcut is Alt + ⌘ + M for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + M for Windows.
• Inline…: The inline refactoring is working contrariwise to the extract method refactoring—it replaces surplus variables with their initializers making the code more compact and concise. The shortcut is Alt + ⌘ + N for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + N for Windows.

Summary

In this article, you have learned about the most distinctive features of WebStorm, which are the core constituents of improving your efficiency in building web applications.

Resources for Article:

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Further resources on this subject:

• Introduction to Spring Web Application in No Time [article]
• Applications of WebRTC [article]
• Creating Java EE Applications [article]

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