Custom formatting
An editor for a DSL should provide a mechanism for rearranging the text of the program in order to improve its readability, without changing its semantics. For example, nested regions inside blocks should be indented, and the user should be able to achieve that with a menu.
Besides that, implementing a custom formatter has also other benefits, since the formatter is automatically used by Xtext when you change the EMF model of the AST. If you tried to apply the quickfixes we implemented in Chapter 4, Validation, you might have noticed that after the EMF model has changed, the editor immediately reflects this change. However, the resulting textual representation is not well formatted, especially for the quickfix that adds the missing ...
Get Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend - Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
