GraPacc: A graph-based pattern-oriented, context-sensitive code completion tool

Abstract

Code completion tool plays an important role in daily development activities. It helps developers by auto-completing tedious and detailed code during an editing session. However, existing code completion tools are limited to recommending only context-free code templates and a single method call of the variable under editing. We introduce GraPacc, an advanced, context-sensitive code completion tool that is based on frequent API usage patterns. It extracts the context-sensitive features from the code under editing, for example, the API elements on focus and the current editing point, and their relations to other code elements. It then ranks the relevant API usage patterns and auto-completes the current code with the proper elements according to the chosen pattern.