Visualize app.json dependencies in VSCode (using GraphViz)

If you’ve been following the latest and greatest from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must be aware about “what’s cooking in Microsoft’s Lab“. In short, Microsoft is working on a possibility to generate a DGML file for your extension that you’re compiling. A DGML file is basically a file that contains all code cross references. Remember “where used” .. well .. that! I can only recommend to watch Vincent‘s session “BCLE237 From the lab: What’s on the drawing board for Dynamics 365 Business Central” from Microsoft’s Virtual Launch Event. You’ll see that you’ll be able to generate an awesome graphical representation of your dependencies:

After you have seen that session, you might wonder why I created my own “Dependency Graph”. Well .. you know .. I have been willing to do this for a very long time. Actually ever since I showed our dependency analysis, where we basically created a GraphVis representation of our C/AL Code .. a tool which I shared as well. That was working for C/AL, and I wanted to be able to show a dependency analysis based on the app.json files. Fairly easy to do .. in PowerShell. But .. we have a decent development environment now .. and I already did some minor things in an extension .. so why not …

Visualize app.json dependencies in VSCode using GraphViz

There is not much to explain, really. In my CRS AL Language Extension, I created a new command that you can find in the command palette:

This command will read all app.json files in your workspace (so this function is really useful in a Multi Root workspace) and create a .dot (graphviz) dependency file from it:

It’s a really simple, readable format.
Now, in VSCode, there are extensions that let you build and preview this format. I liked the extension “Graphviz Interactive Preview“. If you have this extension installed, my command will automatically open the preview after generating the graph. You can also do that yourself by:

With something like this as a result:

Settings

I just figured that sometimes you might want to remove a prefix from the names, or not take Microsoft’s apps into account, or not show test-apps, or… . So I decided to create these settings:

• CRS.DependencyGraph.IncludeTestApps: Whether to include all dependencies to test apps in the Dependency Graph.
• CRS.DependencyGraph.ExcludeAppNames: List of apps you don’t want in the dependency graph.
• CRS.DependencyGraph.ExcludePublishers: List of publishers you don’t want in the dependency graph.
• CRS.DependencyGraph.RemovePrefix: Remove this prefix from the appname in the graph. Remark: this has no influence on the ‘Exclude AppNames’ setting.

So, with these settings:

You can make the above graph easily a bit more readable:

Now, to me, this graph makes all the sense in the world – because I know what these names mean. But please let it loose to your extensions and let me know what you think ;-).

Enjoy!
And I’m looking forward to the DGML abilities and what the community will do with that!