Clarity about template formatting rules #14026

onsah · 2026-06-22T12:20:20Z

onsah
Jun 22, 2026

We, in (IntelliJ Scala Plugin team) are reimplementing the formatter for Play templates and I noticed there are no guidelines or suggested formatting structure in the documentation. It would be nice if a suggested formatting structure existed.

I tried to infer it from samples but sometimes they are contradicting. For example, should the rest of the document be indented if the file contains template parameters or not? https://github.com/playframework/play-samples/blob/3.0.x/play-scala-isolated-slick-example/app/views/update.scala.html and https://github.com/playframework/play-samples/blob/3.0.x/play-scala-isolated-slick-example/app/views/index.scala.html do different things in this case.

Also, there is some ambiguity about when to indent the children of a HTML element. For example, ul doesn't seem indent the child play expression in it based on this example:

<ul>
@for(p <- products) {
  <li>@p.name ($@p.price)</li>
}
</ul>

but div does:

<h1>Home</h1>

<div id="side">
  @common.sideBar()
</div>

is this intentional?

unkarjedy · 2026-06-22T14:02:55Z

unkarjedy
Jun 22, 2026

cc @mkurz

0 replies

mkurz · 2026-06-25T12:28:21Z

mkurz
Jun 25, 2026
Maintainer

there are no guidelines or suggested formatting structure in the documentation
...
is this intentional?

You are right, there are no guidelines for twirl templates. It is basically up to the devs how they want to structure twirl code.

You probably know that already, but Twirl by default supports following formats:

html: *.scala.html handled by play.twirl.api.HtmlFormat
text: *.scala.txt handled by play.twirl.api.TxtFormat
xml: *.scala.xml handled by play.twirl.api.XmlFormat
javascript: *.scala.js handled by play.twirl.api.JavaScriptFormat

Maybe it makes sense if you follow the guidelines you have implemented for html / text / xml / js files already anyway? In the end there a just a handful twirl tags anyway (after the imports and the template parameters).

Devs can implement their own twirl formats as well - maybe you can just detect that with a pattern like filename.scala.<extension> and if you have a formatter implemented already for the <extension> you can just apply that formater - maybe the twirl tags can be take care of globally so any template format could be handled by IntelliJ? You know what I mean? I am not sure however how IntelliJ implements their formatters internally - like are the independent of each other or share some code base where we could hook in twirl tags handling (?)
(I hope this is somehow understandable ;)

btw, I would not indent anything after the template params so the rough scheme should probably be:

@import ...
@(param: Foo, ...)
<html>
    <head>
    </head>
   // html with twirl tags here with normal html indent now
</html>

0 replies

onsah · 2026-06-26T12:57:22Z

onsah
Jun 26, 2026
Author

Thanks for the response @mkurz

I am not sure however how IntelliJ implements their formatters internally - like are the independent of each other or share some code base where we could hook in twirl tags handling (?)

Yes that's what we do usually, it still requires some work for a new extension but most of the functionality is reused.

I was just confused about examples like:

<ul>
@for(p <- products) {
  <li>@p.name ($@p.price)</li>
}
</ul>

which a normal HTML element would indent, but here the @for doesn't indent. Would say always indenting play blocks like a regular HMTL element here makes more sense?

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Clarity about template formatting rules #14026

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unkarjedy Jun 22, 2026

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mkurz Jun 25, 2026 Maintainer

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onsah Jun 26, 2026 Author

onsah
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