Hook for formatter: idea wanted

[cdietrich]

we have part of our models generated from data in a database.
as langium does not support serialization (with or without formatting)
we currently use this approach

1. write a text file with the models using template strings
2. parse these and call and apply formatter on it.

we wonder if we could spare 2 and call the formatter only if needed e.g.

• in interactive usecase / vscode
  now the question would be when to do this
• before sending the files to vscode / materializing the workspace
• somewhere client or server side in vscode

would be thankful for some hints or ideas

[msujew]

I haven't thought too much about this, but does TextDocument.applyEdits in combination with the formatter work for you? You don't need to write the file to disk, you can just create an in-memory document for the parsed text and run it through the formatter. You can then store the formatted document on disk.

[cdietrich]

We need to figure out what we have in hand. Current we have a background process that transferrs all files (not dsl only) to disk. So nothing that is inited by language server or talks to it