See event publishers and subscribers across your AL / Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central workspace, and the lines that connect them.
AL EventLens indexes [IntegrationEvent], [BusinessEvent], and [EventSubscriber] declarations in your AL workspace for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and its .alpackages dependencies, then surfaces the resolved publisher → subscriber graph in a searchable panel, an activity-bar view, and inline CodeLens hints. No more grepping across apps to figure out who is listening to which event.
Screenshots
Features
Workspace-wide event index — Parses .al files in the workspace and .app packages in .alpackages to build a single index of publishers and subscribers. Pre-BC22 ('Codeunit Name', 'OnEvent') and BC22+ (Codeunit::"Name", OnEvent) subscriber syntaxes are both recognized.
Resolved subscriber → publisher links — Each subscriber is matched against its target publisher and marked resolved or unresolved. Unresolved subscribers usually mean the target app is missing from .alpackages; resolved ones are click-jumpable.
Trigger events as first-class publishers — Implicit table and page trigger events (OnAfterDeleteEvent, OnBeforeValidateEvent, …) are synthesized as virtual publishers so subscribers to them resolve cleanly.
Searchable webview panel — Publisher list with per-row subscriber count and hover tooltips; click a publisher to see all subscribers in a detail pane with resolved (✓) / unresolved (⚠) badges, file path, and line number; click a subscriber to jump to its source. The two-pane divider is draggable (double-click to reset).
Panel filters — App and Kind dropdowns above the publisher list narrow the view to one source app or one AL object kind. The search box accepts app:<id-or-name> and kind:<kind> prefixes as a power-user shortcut for the same filters (e.g. kind:codeunit OnAfterPost).
Activity-bar view — A dedicated AL EventLens view drills four levels: source app (friendly Name + vendor from NavxManifest.xml, GUID fallback when missing) → AL object kind → object → event. Intermediate rows show (events / subscribers) counts so a busy subtree is obvious at a glance; every row has a codicon so the level reads without reading labels.
CodeLens — Live subscriber-count CodeLens above each [IntegrationEvent] and [BusinessEvent] declaration. Click it to open the panel scoped to that publisher.
Mermaid export — One command renders the current publisher's subscriber set as a Mermaid diagram for docs or design reviews.
Incremental re-index on save — Saved AL files re-parse just the touched objects; the rest of the index stays warm.
Indexing progress in the status bar — The initial workspace scan reports per-phase progress (scanning AL files, scanning .alpackages, per-package reads, synthesizing triggers, resolving subscriber links) in the status bar, so large workspaces never look frozen during startup.
Persistent cache — Parsed .app results are cached in extension global storage, keyed by (appId, version, mtime), so re-opening a workspace is near-instant.
VS Code Web ready — All file access goes through vscode.workspace.fs, so the extension runs on vscode.dev and github.dev as well as desktop.
Commands
Command
Description
AL EventLens: Open Panel
Open the searchable publisher/subscriber webview panel.
AL EventLens: Refresh Index
Force a full re-index of the workspace and .alpackages dependencies.
AL EventLens: Reveal Publisher
Open the panel scoped to the publisher under the cursor (also fired by CodeLens).
AL EventLens: Reveal Object
Open the panel and filter the publisher list to a specific AL object (fired by clicking an object row in the activity-bar tree).
AL EventLens: Go to Subscriber
Jump to the source location of a subscriber selected in the panel.
AL EventLens: Export to Mermaid
Copy a Mermaid diagram of the current publisher's subscribers to the clipboard.
All commands are available through the Command Palette (search for "AL EventLens") and through the activity-bar view.
Settings
Setting
Default
Description
alEventLens.cache.enabled
true
Cache parsed .app symbol results in extension global storage.
alEventLens.indexOnSave
true
Re-index AL files incrementally when they are saved.
alEventLens.scanAlpackages
true
Index .alpackages/*.app packages in addition to workspace source.
alEventLens.includeAllAppVersions
false
When .alpackages carries multiple versions of the same app, index all of them instead of just the highest.
alEventLens.includeTriggerEvents
true
Synthesize virtual publishers for table/page trigger events.
alEventLens.codeLens.enabled
true
Show subscriber-count CodeLens above event declarations.
Requirements
Visual Studio Code 1.85 or later.
Issues and feedback
Please file issues and feature requests on GitHub.
