How to access explorer ViewItem state?

[nirvikpurkait]

I am trying to create an extension for my use case which requires the state of a folder (expanded/collapsed) inside a workspace from the inbuilt Explorer, is there any way to get the state of the folder and programmatically change/toggle the state.

Due to api limitations it may not be possible to directly access explorer folder state as ViewItem. If it is possible can you suggest a way? And if it is not possible, what can be potential work-around?

[alefragnani]

Hi @nirvikpurkait ,

I don't see any API that allows you to interact with the Explorer view, the way you are trying to. Even if the Treeview API itself has events like onDidCollapseElement and onDidExpandElement, those are available only to the TreeViews that you created. And interacting with the TreeItems to change/toggle its state, is not available as well.

So, if you really need such level of access to the items in the Explorer view, I would suggest you to open a feature request in the VS Code repo (https://github.com/microsoft/issues), so the VS Code team could take a look.

Hope this helps