rustdoc search: filter by fields on a given type using .

[fmease]

I've caught myself many times trying to search for fields on a specific type by entering search queries like tyctxt.types, only to be greeted by Query parser error: "Unexpected .".

I'd love rustdoc to find all fields named field defined (directly or indirectly via Deref) on “record types”¹ matching path path given the input path.field.

For example, let's assume we are over at rustc's API docs and the query is tyctxt.types. Then, I'd expect rustdoc to find & link to rustc_middle::ty::context::GlobalCtxt.types (TyCtxt derefs to GlobalCtxt).

We could even think about extending this feature to cover path.field.subfield in the future which would denote (pseudo) ⟨typeof ⟦path.field⟧⟩.subfield, although that'd probably be quite hairy to implement performantly.

Related: #88660 (“item” kind filter field).

Footnotes

1. Structs, tuple structs, enum variant structs and enum variant tuple structs. ↩

[fmease]

I wonder what the cost-benefit ratio of this feature is. The main motivation is cutting down the number of search results to ideally one result allowing you to almost instantly jump to the relevant docs if you already have the type & field name in your mind and want to avoid having to carefully look through a long list of results (which I'd argue is a likely scenario in large code bases esp. since field names tend to have quite short and generic names on their own).

Together with ?go_to_first=true or with the setting Directly go to item in search if there is only one result enabled and a browser keyword, this could be quite powerful.

[notriddle]

I would expect it to search non-static methods, too.