Would be nice to select a few tables, and a few fields and generate a search plugin for the component on the fly

Yes, correct.
That would be amazing.
I was just needing it and thinking of it this week.

Out of curiosity have you done a search plugin for any of your components that you have written (or has nayone who has read this)

Last search plugin I did was back for Joomla 2.5, but I believe the way it works on J3.x is different

The tutorial on the official docs is a bit naff

Frankly speaking, no. Never done that, but I've made a lot of plugins for Joomla, so I am not afraid for making the functionality.
The only thing is first making plugins with the builder, and then, do the plugin search.

I have no idea for helping you at the moment.
Let's do the opposite, when you found it, tell me how it works... lol

Added since 3.1.4

www.j-cook.pro/index.php/docs/versions/292-3-1-4
Enjoy it

WOW! Well done

Of course my BIGGEST components that can use this are still using 3.0.10 as I dont have time to convert to ORM but hey, nice that it is there for future use

I just tried extracting and installing the plugin standalone with no success.. well it installs but errors on use, so I suspect I will need to upgrade before I can take advantage

So nice feature !
I will test it to check how i can open only 3 tables of my component out of the 12...