Select Entities in Debugger programatically?

Unity Engine
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1

I’m trying to build a Hierarchy view of entity parents using UIElements Foldout objects. With GameObjects, you can use Selection.activeGameObject = thingToSelect;
Is theres something similar for entities? I’d like to do it how entities are in the inspector, where a component with an Entity field will have a Select button that jumps over to the Debugger window with the referenced entity selected.

2

Everything you would need to do that is internal at the moment and very limited (i.e. you could not do multi-selection).

We will eventually provide ways to set entity selection/inspection and even have a entity-hierarchy window. This is in our backlog and we hope to start working on those very soon.

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3

Could you share a little about the direction you are taking on hierarchies? Since there are no “native” hierarchies for entities, and there a few different approaches to implementing hierarchal relationships, I’m guessing you have determined a recommend/best-practices for building hierarchies.

Native hierarchies would be nice to have instead of storing entity references in other entities. Has something like the way SQL Server HierarchyID works been discussed?

4

Thanks for the clear answer

5

The Entity Hierarchy would allow a way better overview when working with gameobjects with alot of childs. Looking forward to it :slight_smile:
It would be also nice to mark all Prefab Entities with a special icon infront of the Entity.

6

Ideally, what we would want is to have a dedicated window to show entities (calling it a hierarchy might be an abuse of language here) and allow to apply a filter and/or transformation (for ui purposes, no actual changes to the data at this point).

Examples of filter would be:

  • Apply a query
  • Filter by name
  • Filter by component (differently than using a query)
  • Filter by a originating GameObject
  • Etc.

Examples of transformations:

  • Grouping by Parent/Child components
  • Grouping by archetypes/chunks/etc.
  • Grouping by SharedComponent value
  • Etc.

We’re aiming for creating a window that would allow to quickly get to the entities that you are interested in. Most of the filters/transformations would be internal at first. But when we are satisfied with how it works, we’ll allow extensibility on it.

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