Store output of xref-find-apropos in a variable within elisp code

Question

Is it possible to extract the results returned by xref-find-apropos to a variable within elisp code? In particular, I want to get all files names where the found symbol occurs.

So what I want is something like

(let ((results (xref-find-apropos "Symbol")))
  (print (filenames results)))

Or maybe there is a way to achieve this in a different way? I need to access a list of files in my workspace where the given symbol occurs.

I am using ccls as my backend for xref.

Answer 1

By inspecting the xref-find-apropos -> xref--find-xrefs -> xref--create-fetcher functions, we find that xref-backend-apropos is the working horse. Calling that function with the appropriate arguments, we find that it returns a list of structures. Finally, we find that we can achieve what you ask for, using:

(defun my-xref-get-files (pattern)
  (let* ((results (xref-backend-apropos (xref-find-backend) pattern))
         (locations (mapcar #'xref-item-location results)))
    (mapcar #'xref-elisp-location-file locations)))

(setq results (my-xref-get-files "Symbol"))

Answer 2

We can ask for references from the LSP backend directly:

(lsp-request "workspace/symbol" `(:query ,symbol))

This returns a hashmap I can further parse and find locations by looking at 'uri' keys.