Do not chain up-front declarations

[sap]

Do not chain up-front declarations

[hapejot]

You have to do it manually then. Which includes much more work to keep it up to date. Thats why every styleguide for other languages recommends not to align commands.

But using chaining enables the AUTO-Align feature of the ABAP-Editor.

[rdibbern]

I think this section should also be reconsidered due to the fact that the up-front chaining will also be applied by ADT when using the quick assist functionality for not declared variables.

The main reason imho is the refactoring issue: it requires a lot more changes to cut&paste chained variables for refactoring than one-line-data-definitions. The most trouble you have when the you need to cut out the first or the last definition in a chained declaration.

[hapejot]

I agree. I am just thinking, that you lose more than you gain:
You gain the benefit of copying a complete line when refactoring manually.
But you lose any alignment, in the data sections, which usually helps me a lot to quickly see the data types of the variables.

Not using colons and aligning does not exclude each other... ;)

[sandraros]

I don't understand why there should be a Clean Code rule for chaining DATA declarations or not.

The reason is, I don't read the declarations, I read the rest of the code. Clicking F2 gives me information on the variables I need to see, and I just need to see one declaration at a time. I don't bother how the DATA lines are aligned, chained or not.

My personal opinion is that this DATA block is often short because the procedure has to be short and inline variables are to be preferred, and so it doesn't harm my eyes a lot if the variable typing is not aligned. But generally speaking, my eyes really prefer to see them aligned (automatically of course, via the pretty printer). Moreover, the ADT Quick Assists converts inline variables into local variables or attributes by chaining them, so I don't want to spend time to "unchain" them!

So, I would love a lot that this section is removed. Same thing for the section "Don't align type clauses". Or the only thing worth saying is "do NOT spend time in aligning manually" and "do NOT spend time in removing the alignment manually". Even a mix of chained and "unchained" DATA doesn't bother me.