In the new SpecFlow v1.6 release, besides other Visual Studio 2010 integration improvements there is one more that I did not mention in my previous post: the automatic table formatting.

I have spent a lot of time by aligning the table columns in the Gherkin files. This new feature tries to address this problem: whenever you type a pipe (|) character in a table that has at least two rows, it realigns the table columns. Here are the rules for the aligning:

• the column widths are calculated based on the cell texts (header and body) without starting/ending whitespaces
• the cell values are aligned to the left with a single padding space
• there is at least one padding space on the right
• the indentation whitespaces of the header row are repeated for the subsequent rows
• comment lines between table rows are handled

The formatting is applied only to the table (parts) before the typed pipe character, simply because of technical reasons: it was easier to preserve the current cursor position this way. Though this sounds a bit weird, this should be still natural if you type in the table row-by-row. If you want to reformat an existing table, just simply re-type the last pipe character.