bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/ui/respect-ui-text-character-limits.md
Jesper Schulz-Wedde e570d6113f Extract 55 knowledge articles from BC review-agent prompt
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.
2026-04-23 16:43:42 +02:00

1.6 KiB
Raw Permalink Blame History

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
ui
caption
tooltip
character-limit
truncation
localization
al
w1
all

Respect Business Central's UI text character limits to avoid truncation

Description

Business Central UI surfaces have practical character limits before the platform truncates or the translator's localization overflows the available space. Authoring captions and tooltips close to the English limit almost guarantees truncation in languages whose translations are longer (German, French, Spanish average 2040% longer than English). The limits are not hard compiler errors — they are product-quality thresholds that agents should flag at author time so the string reaches localization with room to grow.

Best Practice

Author within these approximate limits (English): action and field captions ~40 chars; field-group, menu-item, page, and dialog titles ~40 chars; button captions ~20 chars; action and field tooltips ~250 chars; dialog text and error messages ~250 chars; notifications ~100 chars; checklist ShortTitleChecklist 34, LongerTitleCard 53, CardDescription 180. Leave headroom for longer translations; at 40/40 in English, German is likely to truncate.

Anti Pattern

action(RecalculateAndReapplyAllOutstandingCustomerDiscounts) { Caption = 'Recalculate and reapply all outstanding customer discounts'; } — 58 characters in English, essentially guaranteed to truncate once translated. The fix is to shorten the English caption (Recalculate customer discounts, 30 chars) and move the full sentence into the tooltip where the budget is larger.