Official Experimental Dependency Viewer

Welcome to the Very Experimental Dependency Viewer discussion thread. You can use this thread to ask for help, share feedback, and have discussions about the search-extensions package and its new Dependency Viewer tool.



Introduction
Lots of users have expressed a need for Unity to provide a built-in Dependency Viewer. There are some good packages on the Asset Store offering this kind of functionality but it would be better if it was part of the core workflows of Unity.

Using the Search backend we have been able to build a new Dependency Tool and a Dependency Search Provider. This tool tracks the global selection and shows which assets or GameObjects are Using or are Used by any selected objects. You will also have access to a series of Reports exploring the dependency Graph of your project (Unused assets, broken dependencies, Most used assets...).


Resources

• Search Extensions github package which contains detailed information on how to install the Dependency Viewer.
• Dependency Viewer Documentation Wiki. This explains how the feature works and which workflows are supported.

Requirements
The Search Extensions package will work with Unity 2020.3 and any other versions higher than 2021.2.

• If you are using 20.3: also install the com.unity.quicksearch@3.0.0-preview.14 package.
• If you are using 21.2+ : Search extensions will use the built-in Search framework and do not require any other package.

Getting started

1. Installation instruction for Search Extension package are here.
2. Go into the Window->Search->Dependency Viewer menu.
3. Opening the Dependency Viewer for the first time will start building the Dependency Database. This process is asynchronous and is generally not too long (it depends on the size of your project).
4. When you see the message : Dependency indexing took 2188.93 ms and was saved at Library/dependencies_v1.index in the console you are good to go!
5. Each time you will select a new Asset or GameObject the Dependency Viewer will display the dependencies of the selected object.
6. This section of our documentation wiki explains in greater details what the Dependency Viewer is capable of.

Here are some links to nifty features of the Dependency viewer:

• Dependency Viewer UI Tour.
• Customizing the Column layout.
• Loading a Dependency Reports.
• Project Browser Integration.
• Technical Overview of Dependency parsing.

Current state
The tool is current in early alpha. Some clients have played a bit with it but we want to gather more feedback on usability, performance and stability. Some current limitations are:

• There is not incremental update of the Dependency Database. If you want to update the dependencies you have to manually clicked the Build button.
• This is a Dependency Viewer and not a Dependency Manager. This means you can reason about your project and better understand the links between assets but we have not build workflows to act on this information (no asset mass replace and no ways to easily fix broken dependencies).
• We only show direct dependencies. That is dependencies at a single level deep of the selected assets.

What's next
We want to know from the community if the current tool provides value. Then we want to improve the tool according to the feedback we will receive. Some features we are thinking about:

• Incremental update of the Dependency Database.
• Allow users to register custom Dependency indexer
• Add new dependency reports (like Build dependencies)
• Add more filtering options
• Add Depth slider to show dependencies that more than a level deep from the selected object.
• Add more advance workflows to manipulate Dependencies:
  • Mass replace of Assets
  • Helper to fix broken dependencies
  • Safe Delete of unused assets

Feedback
In terms of feedback, we're especially looking for:

• Can you think of any use cases that are not covered yet?
  
• Are there any workflows that are unclear or missing?
• Are there any issues or unclear parts in the documentation?
• Is the Dependency Database accurate: are there dependencies that were not found?
• Any feedback on usability and performance.

Please share your feedback in this thread.


How to report bugs
Since the feature is heavily in development if you find a bug, please log it using the Issue section of our Github project.

• Attach a (stripped) project when there are issues.

Have a look at this page for more information and best practices around bug reporting.

Thank you for your interest, we're looking forward to your feedback!

 

That is not the goal short term, but clearly something we need to do medium/long term in collaboration with the UITK team.

Good point. Once we have a good idea of the direction the tool will take, we'll work with a UI designer to standardize and cleanup the UI.

We can make the Ping object optional, this way it doesn't change the selection or project view. Also we eventually want to have the inspector show more dependency info.

 

What do you think if I reuse the same search tracking preference for the dependency viewer. Would that make sense? If this option is turned off, no ping occurs when the selection changes.

 

I have added a way to see the object runtime size (if available and computable) compared to the asset file size.



This column take a bit of time to compute per asset, but it can be useful to figure out if an asset takes a lot of memory at runtime.

 

Hi Lars would you clarify what you mean with emtoy Folder indicator? Are you saying folder shouls be displayed in the Dependency Viewer and have a special badge if they are empty?

 

All good! I understand We will take notes on this.

 

Thanks for the great feedback.

Clearly something we will fix.

At first this was by design. After some discussion with other users will add a preference to select when you want the dependency provider to initialize. (i.e. at startup, first time you open the dependency viewer, never)

Absolutely. We haven't disclosed much about the Dependency Graph Viewer because at the moment it is very just a toy. We need to explorer many advance UX workflow to make it very useful. Right now it lacks a lot of UX to browse dependencies.

Clearly something we can explore and provide a preference for it.

This is possible in >=2021.2 by adding new Search Table Columns.

Start dragging assets from the project browser into that view and then expand dependencies by clicking the little +.

If you want more fun, once you have a few dependency floating around. Right click in an empty space and select Layout > Spring

 

Oh, yes I need to deploy a new version of the search extension package since now

vertices

and

faces 

are built-in scene filters in the QS package.

I will try to do this today or tomorrow.

 

Can you retry with

"com.unity.search.extensions": "https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/com.unity.search.extensions.git#bb0105bd0f32157d9066cc47a76badda44aadd4e",

 

Hi all,

we are investigating new workflows to improve the value of the Dependency Viewer. The goal: help you act on information reported by the DepViewer. Some examples:

- Help you track which properties are referring missing GUIDs and setup replacement for this missing assets
- Safe Delete: when deleting an asset, warn about dependencies that might be affected.

If you have any other ideas on such workflows to help clean up or fix your project feel free to post your suggestions here.

Thanks,

Seb

 

This also something I want to push further. We will sync with UX designer to see how we can provide the best experience for that.

Right now it is possible to select multiple assets to see the combined dependencies but I agree it would be nice to have a way to quickly see which dependencies are shared. Would a color code or another column be better to represent that info? I will add this to our TODO.



Maybe we could render shared item in bold?

Thanks for the feedback

 

Thanks for your feedback Baste. Those are good suggestions. We are taking notes

 

Indeed, I think we need to do something custom for asmdef. I will add this to our todo list for 22.2.

Thanks,

 

Hi, would you only expect to see other asmdef references or you would expect to see all scripts compiled by the asmdef too?

 

Here's what if gives with asmdef and scripts refs:



And the other way around for AliveAction.cs



See https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/com.unity.search.extensions/pull/12

 

This case should already be covered. You can test with https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/com.unity.search.extensions/pull/12 if you have such a setup. Please let me know if you think something is missing.

Thanks,

 

Hmm a few users internally has reported that error too. I'll have to check with the Package Manager team why we get that git-lfs error. I'll get back to you.

 

Hi! Yes, there is a dependency graph vizualisation. If you click on "Window/Search/Dependency Graph Viewer", you should see a window pop up. In this window, you can drag and drop assets and inspect their dependencies and references.

 

Once you drop an asset in the graph view, you can click on the numbered buttons to open the references/dependencies one level deep. If you wish to go deeper, you can do the same on the newly added references/dependencies to continue exploring the dependency hierarchy. In other words, this graph is interactive.

 

Have you built the dependencies first? We have a bug when the dependencies are not built dragging an item in the dependency graph viewer hangs Unity. Otherwise, you can always check with the profiler if you can see anything related with the Search Extensions or QuickSearch.

 

It should work with packages as well. For example, I have a scene that uses two prefabs that I have in my project, and one of those prefabs (the Cylinder) uses a script coming from the Timeline package (SignalReceiver). The references are correctly shown:

All the assets show the description "In Project", but they should show where they are coming from (i.e. Project, Packages, built-in resources). We just didn't have the time to work on this.

 

There currently isn't. But it's a good idea to have a setting to enable/disable automatic indexing.

 

This is a great tool.

I've got an Android project I'm looking at and wonder how I might pull up the "Compression Format" for the audioClips I have found in the search.
I can pull up properties for the audioClip such as Size, Path with this line:

select{t:audioclip, @name, @Size, @Path as "Full Path" }

but can't seem to locate a way to get the compression used (e.g. ASTC) for the audio file. Maybe AudioClip isn't the right type to search?

Thoughts?

 

Hi! You can use this query that will select the compression format of an audio file:

select{t:audioclip,  [USER=206145]@name[/USER], [USER=919983]@Size[/USER], [USER=437808]@Path[/USER], #compressionformat}

You can use

#

for known properties that are not a builtin selector (i.e. name, path, etc.). One way to find such a property is to use the autocomplete feature of Search:

If you are not sure what the property is called, you can also check the keywords indexed by the Search index, and you will find a list of properties you can filter, and where they come from:

 

This is a good suggestion. I will suggest it to our designer.

Keep in mind the Dependency Viewer has been put into hiatus for now since we are focusing more on general Unity stability but this is a project we will resume mid term.