Filter by Attributes in Explorer

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to find all instances in a game that have a specific attribute, or find all instances that have a specific attribute value.

It would be great if I could filter the explorer to:

  • show all instances with a certain attribute name
  • show all instances with a certain attribute value

My most common use for attributes is having the name of a config table stored as a string (i.e. object:GetAttribute("ObjectType") == "StrongFence"). I occasionally find myself wanting to browse all instances with the ObjectType attribute to see which types are in use, or find all instances with a specific ObjectType value for the purpose of renaming the type or making sure that all of the uses are correct. At the moment, the most efficient way to do this is through writing custom code into the command line.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I’d be able to manage my game’s attributes more efficiently.

12 Likes

Hi, this is absolutely desired though I want to outline some of the complexity as to why we shipped without this. Essentially, it is trivial today for us to do existing property searches with Property = Value, as we can statically know every property that you could possibly be searching for, and ignore everything without that property.

However attributes remove this valuable optimization property, pun intended. I was going to put it on a separate syntax like a:AttributeName = value (longform attribute:AttributeName = value) but got a bit squeamish. I think I’ll end up doing that someday though.

9 Likes

Does someday mean… a year? two? Really needed functionality for my project right now.
Our games map has hundreds of thousands of roblox objects all placed strategically all over the place. Using this filter will help me check certain objects without having to check every object.

Does someday mean… a year? two?

No ETA, but not soon.

In the meantime it’s technically possible to make a plugin yourself that does all of this. It would take a substantial amount of work, but if this is a big blocker for your project, it might be worth the effort.

1 Like

a bit biased, but this is why i still prefer to use object based values over using attributes, it makes things less hidden and easier to notice and search

1 Like

Dude, its really annoying that I can’t search attributes because I store stuff sometimes under attributes and i legit cant search it to change it quickly :expressionless:

Needed this just now to remove a bunch of attributes that are no longer used. I’m migrating to an attribute with an opposite meaning so I need to know which parts the old attribute used to be on. Had to use command bar.

2 Likes