"Remove needless spaces": Support for PARAMETERs about abap-cleaner HOT 1 OPEN

Hi ConjuringCoffee,

yes, this is a bit of a functional gap – "Align declarations" so far doesn't consider PARAMETERS, but is focused on the kind of declarations that you will find in classes.

I can explain the behavior of "Remove needless spaces" here. As you can see from the description, this cleanup rule tries to "Remove multiple spaces where no alignment intention can be identified." For this, the cleanup rule looks up and down to see whether there is some alignment (among similar token types) which might have been intentional. In this case,

PARAMETERS p_test1 RADIOBUTTON GROUP 1.
PARAMETERS p_test2    RADIOBUTTON GROUP 1.
PARAMETERS p_test3 AS CHECKBOX.

there are actually two keywords which are aligned: RADIOBUTTON in the second line and CHECKBOX in the third line. Therefore, ABAP cleaner preserves this alignment (although, of course, the human reader immediately knows that this was NOT intended; but ABAP cleaner is deterministic, not AI-based…).

In your second example, there is no such alignment, therefore ABAP cleaner is "confident" that there is no deep reason to these extra spaces.

Kind regards,
Jörg-Michael

from abap-cleaner.