Tag: formatting

Avoiding Code Style Discussions

Every developer has personal formatting preferences.
Brace placement, line wrapping, imports, tabs vs. spaces — everybody has an opinion, and most of them are reasonable.

The problem starts when all these styles meet in one repository.

The cost of “personal style”

A codebase written by ten developers can easily look like ten different applications stitched together. Suddenly, pull requests are full of formatting changes. Git diffs become noisy. Merge conflicts appear because one developer reformatted a file differently than another. Code reviews drift into discussions about whitespaces instead of actual functionality.

Even worse: inconsistent code slows down reading.

Humans recognize patterns quickly. When code follows the same visual structure everywhere, the brain spends less effort parsing syntax and more effort understanding intent.

Consistent formatting reduces cognitive load.

A shared style is less about aesthetics and more about reducing friction. But how to solve this problem?

Shared Project Style

In IDEs like IntelliJ, you can define a code style and automatically reformat code according to those rules. This helps you keep your own code consistent. However, if every developer uses a different style, it does not help the project as a whole.

You can configure the style under:

Settings -> Editor -> Code Style

and save it as a project-level configuration. IntelliJ will then create a codeStyles folder with XML files inside the .idea directory.

The solution for sharing one configuration across the whole project is to commit these files to Git. This way, every developer working on the project uses the same code style configuration.

The IDE can then help enforce the agreed style by reformatting code before commit or even automatically on save.


Consistency beats preference

The important thing is not finding the perfect style. The important thing is agreeing on one.

A consistent codebase is easier to read, easier to review, and easier to maintain. Pull requests become smaller and cleaner because they contain actual changes instead of formatting noise.

Good formatting should be boring and automatic. That leaves more time for discussions that actually matter.

Format-based sorting looks clever, but is dangerous

A neat trick I learnt early in my career, even before I learnt about version control, was how to format a date as a string so that alphabetically sorted lists would contain them in the “correct” order:

“YYYYMMDD” is the magic string.

If you format your dates as 20230122 and 20230123, the second name will be sorted after the first one. With nearly any other format, your date strings will not be sorted chronologically in the file system.

I’ve found out that this is also nearly the only format that most people cannot intuitively recognize as a date. So while it is familiar with me and conveniently sorted, it is confusing or at least in need of explanation for virtually every user of my systems.

Keep that in mind when listening to the following story:

One project I adopted is a custom enterprise resource planning system that was developed by a single developer that one day left the company and the code behind. The software was in regular use and in dire need of maintenance and new features.

One concept in the system is central to its users: the list of items in an invoice or a bill of delivery. This list contains items in a defined order that is important to the company and its customers.

To my initial surprise, the position of an item in the list was not defined by an integer, but a string. This can be explained by the need of “sub-positions” that form a hierarchy of items, like in this example:

1 – basic item

1.1 – item upgrade #1

1.2 – item upgrade #2

Both positions “1.1” and “1.2” are positioned “underneath” position “1” and should be considered glued to it. If you move position “1” to position “4”, you also move 1.1 to 4.1 and 1.2 to 4.2.

But there was a strange formatting thing going on with the positions: They were stored as strings in the database, but with a strange padding in front. Instead of “1”, “2” and “3”, the entries contained the positions ” 1″, ” 2″ and ” 3″. All positions were prefixed with two space characters!

Well, nearly all positions. As soon as the list grew, the padding turned out to be dependent on the number of digits in the position: ” 9″, but then ” 10″ and “100”.

The reason can be found relatively simple: If you prefix with spaces (or most other characters, maybe “0”), your strings will be ordered in a numerical way. Without the prefixes, they would be sorted like “1”, “10”, “11”, “2”.

That means that the desired ordering of the positions is hardcoded in the database representation! You probably already thought about the case of a position greater than 999. That’s when trouble begins! Luckily, an invoice with a thousand items on the list is unheard of in the company (yet!).

Please note that while the desired ordering is hardcoded in the database, the items are still loaded in a different order (as they were entered into the system) and need to be sorted by the application. The default sorting for strings is the alphabetical order, so the original developer probably was clever/lazy, went with it and formatted the data in a way that would produce the result and not require additional logic during the sorting.

If you look at the code, you see seemingly strange formatting calls to the position all over the place. This is necessary because, for example, every time a user enters a position into the system, it needs to be reformatted (or at least sanitized) in order to adhere to the “auto-sortable” format.

If you wonder how a hierarchical sub-position looks like with this format, its ” 1. 1″, ” 1. 10″ and even ” 1. 17. 2. 4″. The database stores mostly blanks in this field.

While this approach might seem clever at the moment, it is highly dangerous. It conflates several things that should stay separated, like “storage format” and “display format”, “item order” or just “valid value range”. It is a clear violation of the “separation of concerns” principle. And it broke the application when I missed one place where the formatting was required, but not present. Of course, this only manifests in a problem when your test cases (or manual tries) exceed a list of 9 entries – lesson learnt here.

I dread the moment when the company calls to tell me about this “unusually large invoice” that exceeds the 999 limit. This would mean a reformatting of all stored data or another even more clever hack to circumvent the problem.

Did you encounter a format that was purely there for sorting in the wild? What was the story? Tell us in the comments!

Displaying numbers in tables

Many software applications have to display series of numbers, for example statistical information, measurement values or financial data. Of course there are many ways to visualize values graphically with charts, but sometimes the user wants to see the actual values as numbers. The typical layout method to display numbers are tables.

Here are some guidelines you should follow when you have to display numbers in a table.

Integer numbers

Right aligned integer numbers
Right-aligned integer numbers

Integer numbers that are shown in a table column should be right-aligned, because the orders of magnitude of a number’s digits increase from right to left. Additionally you should choose a font with fixed-width digits for numbers. This ensures that digits with the same orders of magnitude line up. Thus the numbers can be compared more easily. The font itself doesn’t have to be a fixed-width font in general. Some proportional fonts with variable widths for letters have fixed-widths for digits, called tabular figures.

Non-integer numbers

Aligned with decimal points
Aligned with decimal points

Non-integer numbers with decimal points should be aligned with their decimal points. The reason is the same as above: digits with the same orders of magnitude should line up. This can be a bit more effort to implement in your application than mere right-alignment, because components such as UI widgets or HTML tables usually don’t directly support this form of alignment.

However, you can implement it by using a font with tabular figures and then right-pad the numbers with spaces. Each of these spaces must have the same width as a digit, of course. This is the case with a fixed-width font, but there is also a special Unicode character for this purpose that can be used with proportional fonts and tabular figures: it’s called figure space and has the Unicode code point U+2007.