AL EventLens
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). A Publishers / Subscribers toggle at the top switches the panel between the publisher list and a flat, searchable list of every subscriber — resolved and unresolved alike.
- 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).
- Publishers view — A dedicated
AL EventLens activity-bar 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.
- Subscribers view — A second activity-bar tree, below Publishers, lists every subscriber the workspace declares — grouped owning app → object kind → object → subscribed event — with a
✓ / ⚠ resolved badge per row. Unlike the publisher-nested list, this surfaces unresolved subscribers (whose target app is missing from .alpackages), which otherwise appear nowhere. Click a row to open the panel focused on that subscriber.
- 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: Reveal Subscriber |
Open the panel in Subscribers mode focused on a subscriber (fired by clicking a row in the Subscribers view). |
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.
License
MIT
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