Navigational aid for Spring Events

[jonsmithers]

Expected Behavior

Anytime you trigger or listen for a spring event, IntelliJ presents these gutter icons. When clicked, a popup will list every place that triggers the event you're listening for OR every place that listens for the event that you're triggering, allowing you to easily jump to these locations. I like this feature.

Current Behavior

Currently there is nothing to aid navigation between event listeners and triggerers.

Context

This feature is pretty handy in a codebase that relies on Spring Events.

As an alternative, I could consider refactoring the code to not use Spring Events. Spring Events are harder to navigate compared to plain old function invocations, unless the IDE provides this navigational aid.

[martinlippert]

Thanks @jonsmithers for raising this enhancement request, sounds indeed like a great feature to add. Let's see how we can get this realized.

Do you use the Spring Tools in Eclipse or VSCode?

[jonsmithers]

Using vscode here! And awesome, thank you!

[martinlippert]

Moving out to 4.29.0 release, more groundwork needed in the indexer code to allow something like this.

[martinlippert]

The first version of this includes basic information about event listeners and event publishers in the internal index for Spring elements and allows to use the "Go To References" feature inside of VSCode to find all publishers for the specific event type when invoked from a listener and vice versa.

There are no gutter icons or features in the gutter for this specifically, the type hierarchy of events is not yet taken into account, and there is no way to invoke this from the Java editor inside of Eclipse yet. All those things should be captured in separate issues as improvements moving forward.

[martinlippert]

(please note that even though the 4.28.0 release is not yet out there, this will appear starting from release 4.29.0.