Support Custom Event Name via Annotation for Stored Events

[zeng-alt]

I’m currently using Spring Modulith’s event publication mechanism, and I noticed that when events are stored in the database (e.g., using EventPublicationRegistry with a persistent EventPublicationRepository), the system stores basic metadata such as the event type and timestamp.

It would be useful for us to store a custom event name (a human-readable identifier) in addition to the event’s class name. This would help in logging, querying, or categorizing events more easily—especially when the same event class might be reused in different contexts.

I’d like to propose an enhancement where we could annotate the event class with a custom name, for example:

@EventName("user.registered")
public class UserRegisteredEvent {

}

The framework could then optionally persist this value along with the event metadata.

Benefits:

Makes stored event data more readable and meaningful

Helps categorize and filter events

Can aid integration with observability tools or analytics dashboards

Would this be a reasonable addition? If so, I’d be happy to help contribute or collaborate on a PR.

Thanks for the great work on Spring Modulith!

[odrotbohm]

I am not fundamentally opposed to introducing such a mechanism. That said, I'd like to state that most of the alleged benefits already work with the current state of affairs. You can certainly categorize and filter using the fully qualified type names already.

Furthermore, using aliases imposes a significant challenge to the infrastructure, as we now need to know about all event types to resolve them when reading aliased entries from the registry. This would require an additional round of scanning types on application bootstrap. Not the end of the world, I guess, but detrimental to startup performance.

That said, I can see that an aliasing mechanism provides additional stability, especially considering refactorings of event types.