How to disable formatting for snippet? Java/Maven

How do I turn off formatting for a certain bit of code?

I am trying to disable it for a method chain.

I’ve tried using // @formatter syntax e.g.

public void foo() {
  // @formatter:off
  here()
    .dont().format()
  .the()
       .code();
  // @formatter:off
  // format as normal from here...
}

but this approach doesn’t seem to work.

Is there a way to do this in spotless?

Thanks

[jbduncan]

@mattcopas You’re very welcome!

I don’t know if this will help, but with Spotless you can exclude certain files from being formatted, so if you have Java files that contain a lot of DSL-like code or unusual method chaining, you could exclude them from being formatted by google-java-format and manually format and maintain them yourself.

Something like the following (untested, and may only work with Gradle’s Kotlin DSL!):

spotless {
  java {
    target(fileTree("src/**/*.java") {
        exclude(
            "**/com/company/package/FirstFileWeDoNotWantToFormat.java",
            "**/com/company/package/SecondFileWeDoNotWantToFormat.java")
    })
  }
}

[nedtwigg]

Just an update that since plugin-gradle 5.5.0 and plugin-maven 2.3.0, it is now possible to use any formatter, in any language, and exclude specific snippets with spotless:off tags.