CDS source formatting and readability

[qmacro]

Hey folks, I just published a blog post CDS source formatting and readability, on embracing a modern approach to source code formatting for human-centric modelling in CAP. I'd love to know what you think of this concept, if and how you're using formatting, what your preferences are and more.

[danjoa]

I also use the CDS formatters frequently and checked with the team how we could even more improve it, ideally by as much covered in the defaults as possible, ... here are some examples:

1. Line breaks in using clauses only when the length exceeds 123:

   // keep that as is:
   using { Currency, managed, sap } from '@sap/cds/common'; 

2. Line breaks in Associations only when the length exceeds 144:

   // keep that as is:
   books : Association to many Books on books.author = $self;

3. entity ... as select from ... → keep as select from in same line
4. ...

[qmacro]

Nice. I am minded of perhaps my fav quote of all time, from the creator of MINIX, Andrew Tanenbaum: "The nice thing about standards, is that there are so many to choose from".

In my ideal world we'd coalesce (sooner than later) on a "standard standard" and use that for everything, or at least as much CDS model source as possible.

[tim-sh]

@danjoa For item 3, we already have boolean formatting option selectInNewLine.

How urgent would you consider the other ones?

In terms of UX, I'd prefer a numeric option for the max line length before breaking, for all relevant contexts. I.e., I wouldn't want to offer separate options for the (potentially growing) list of all applicable cases such as using and association.

What do you think?