Bug 260659

Description Lenik 2009-01-11 22:03:39 EST

Build ID: I20081211-1908

Steps To Reproduce:
Sorry I didn't find where to put feature request, so I put here. 

The java code formatter supports to align fields in columns, and sometimes fields across the method boundary are aligned in separate positions, for example:
    // A
    int aaa = 2; 
    float b = 3; 
    
    void f() {}

    // B
    int c;
    long d = 3; 
    
is formatted to:
    // A
    int   aaa = 2; 
    float b   = 3; 
    
    void f() {}
    
    // B
    int  c;
    long d = 3; 
    
here group B didn't follow the tabstop position as shown in group A. 
But there is no way to manually specify how to divide the fields into groups, sometimes I want the fields be always aligned across a lot of very small sized methods, and more often, in particular if there declared a serialVersionUID field: 

  private static final long serialVersionUID = 123; 

the field has a really long name, and it expands the following fields too much and results in a very ugly code format. 

As a suggest, fields can be divided into groups by:

1, empty line
  many programmers like to write short comments after the end of field declaration, and so an empty line can just separate two groups:

    int   aaa = 2;  // A...
    float b   = 33; // BB...
    
    int  c; 
    long d = 3; // DD

2, special hint in comment

    int   aaa = 2;  // A...
    float b   = 33; // BB...

    //--

    int  c; 
    long d = 3; // DD



More information:
I've went deep into the org.eclipse.jdt source code, but the code relates to the formatter is really hard to read. And there are two versions of the formatter and they look like in two totally different design. So I abandoned to implement this feature by myself.