Adds 55 articles (plus 76 code samples) spanning four new domains and
two existing domains, extracted from the internal Business Central
review-agent prompt. Content was filtered against BCQuality's
remedial-knowledge premise: each article encodes BC-specific behaviour,
a CodeCop rule, a platform API semantic, or an anti-false-positive
guideline that a capable LLM would otherwise get wrong.
New domains:
- privacy (11 articles): DataClassification inheritance semantics, the
StrSubstNo-defeats-Error-telemetry-classification pitfall, Privacy
Notice consent for outgoing requests, anti-false-positives for pages
and in-memory data.
- upgrade (11 articles): upgrade-codeunit structure, upgrade-tag
lifecycle and registration, protected DB reads, DataTransfer for
large datasets, InitValue semantics, enum-ordinal preservation,
obsolete-workflow, first-install detection.
- ui (9 articles): caption capitalization by phrase type, tooltip voice,
teaching-tip vs tooltip, tour-tip conventions, character limits,
banned terms, ampersand handling, title punctuation.
- style (11 articles): label-suffix convention, API page naming,
temporary-variable prefix, label properties (Comment/Locked), named
invocations, FieldCaption in user messages, OptionCaption pairing,
Error-parameter passing, `this` keyword, required parentheses, file
naming.
Gaps in existing domains:
- performance (11 articles): production-scale table catalog (no row
counts, per internal-data concern), anti-false-positive for bounded
tables, guard-before-Get ordering, redundant-Get-in-OnAfterGetRecord,
LockTable in read-only helpers, combined ModifyAll passes, writes in
OnAfterGetRecord, SetLoadFields heuristics, temporary-table
regressions, FlowField source-table widening, MaintainSQLIndex
disabling SIFT.
- security (2 articles): environment-specific hardcoded GUIDs,
ValidateTableRelation=false on user input.
Intentionally excluded: specific production P95 row-count numbers
(aggregated internal telemetry); rewritten as categorical guidance on
which tables to treat as production-scale without publishing sizes.
All articles use `bc-version: [all]` (applies to every BC version, per
the new schema sentinel). Validator passes with 0 errors / 0 warnings.
Most of the corpus — FindSet/SetLoadFields/CalcFields patterns, permission
sets, SingleInstance codeunits, DataClassification, IsolatedStorage,
transaction scope, SecretText — describes BC platform behaviour that is
identical across supported versions. The seed [26..28] range on every
file implied a version-specificity the content does not actually have,
and there was no way to express "applies to every version" in the
schema the way [w1] and [all] already do for countries and
application-area.
Extend the v1 schema with a universal sentinel for bc-version, parallel
to the sentinels already defined for the other dimensions:
bc-version: [all] # applies to every BC version
[all] is mutually exclusive with explicit versions. Range shorthand
([26..28]) and explicit lists ([26, 27, 28]) continue to work for files
genuinely tied to a version-gated API or deprecation.
Update read.md (field definition, matching semantics, partial-context
rule), write.md (default to [all], use ranges only with a concrete
reason), README.md (frontmatter example), and the CI validator. All
forty existing knowledge files and the three action skills convert to
[all]; none of the current content is version-gated. Validator passes.
Remove seven knowledge files whose content is generic software-engineering
guidance that a capable LLM already applies without BCQuality present
(HTTPS-only, secret-leakage-in-errors, no-credentials-in-URLs, silent
security-error swallowing, short transaction scope, HTTP timeouts,
StrSubstNo-vs-concatenation). These fail the remedial-knowledge premise
and dilute the signal of the preview corpus.
Strip the "Seed article — domain stewards should expand" banner from ten
files that are ready to showcase (AA0232/AA0233 rules, FindSet read-only
semantics, SetLoadFields ordering and usage, CalcFields-in-loops,
SecretText end-to-end, DataClassification). The banner remains on files
that still need domain-steward refinement.
Add a "What belongs here" section to the README stating the admission
test: a file exists only if a modern LLM would get something wrong or
miss something without it. Gives contributors a concrete yes/no filter
before they open a PR.
The /samples/ top-level tree is replaced with sibling files in each
knowledge-layer folder. An article and its demonstrations now live
side-by-side:
microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.md
microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.good.al
microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.bad.al
Rationale:
- Proximity. An article and its paired samples are one unit; the
filesystem now reflects that.
- Layer ownership. Samples inherit layer precedence for free -- a
/custom/ fork can override an article and its samples atomically,
which the shared /samples/ tree previously made awkward.
- Trivial migration path. Action-skill source globs
(*/knowledge/<domain>/**/*.md) are unchanged; sample discovery is a
sibling-filename lookup.
Changes:
- git mv of all 65 sample files from samples/<domain>/<slug>/{bad,good}.al
to microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.{bad,good}.al (history preserved).
- Update See-sample references in all 37 articles that ship samples.
- skills/read.md: replace the no-code-blocks bullet with a pointer to a
new Sample files section that fully specifies the sibling convention,
the kinds (good/bad + forward-compatible), multi-technology rules,
demonstration-only status, and layer-precedence behaviour.
- skills/write.md: update the samples pointer to match.
- README.md: annotate the knowledge tree with the sample sibling shape.
- samples/README.md deleted; content lifted into skills/read.md.
- Both generators (C:\temp\gen_performance_knowledge.py,
C:\temp\gen_security_knowledge.py) updated to emit at the new paths
and to stop writing samples/README.md. Re-running them is idempotent
against the committed layout.
Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
Converts an existing performance-review prompt into 22 atomic
knowledge articles under microsoft/knowledge/performance/, each
paired with AL samples under samples/performance/<slug>/ demonstrating
the anti-pattern and/or the best practice. The full set seeds the
corpus the microsoft/skills/al-performance-review leaf skill matches
against and validates the READ knowledge-file format end-to-end.
Every article conforms to the READ contract: six required frontmatter
fields, Description always present, no fenced code blocks, sample
code referenced by repo-relative path. Each article is marked with a
blockquote 'Seed article' note so domain stewards can extend or
restructure them freely.
Articles (ordered by concern area):
Database query efficiency
- use-findset-with-next (AA0181)
- avoid-findfirst-with-next (AA0233)
- only-fetch-records-you-use (AA0175)
- use-findset-readonly-by-default
- use-setloadfields-for-partial-records
- use-addloadfields-in-report-layouts
- use-calcsums-to-aggregate-filtered-sets (file: use-calcsums-for-flowfield-totals.md)
- avoid-calcfields-in-loops
- add-sift-keys-for-flowfields (AA0232)
- use-isempty-for-existence-checks
Filter and key optimization
- filter-before-find
- set-current-key-to-match-filters
Temporary tables and transactions
- use-temporary-tables-for-intermediate-data
- keep-transaction-scope-short
- avoid-user-interaction-in-transactions
- avoid-commit-inside-loops
Record operations
- prefer-get-for-primary-key-lookups
- use-insert-false-when-skipping-triggers
- prefer-direct-record-over-recordref
Strings, codeunits, events
- use-strsubstno-for-message-formatting
- use-single-instance-codeunits-for-caching
- keep-event-subscribers-lightweight
samples/README.md documents the sample-folder convention and makes
clear the samples are demonstration-only, not derived from BC base
application source, with unique object IDs in the 50100-50199 range.
Rubber-duck pass caught: a misleading good.al in avoid-calcfields-in-loops
(fixed by switching to a hoistable CalcFields scenario), an invalid
event subscriber signature in keep-event-subscribers-lightweight
(fixed by adding var xRec), normative guidance leaked into the
Description of use-findset-readonly-by-default (moved to Anti Pattern),
a missing sample pair for keep-transaction-scope-short (added), and
muddy FlowField/CalcSums framing (retitled and clarified).
Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
