bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/style/include-comment-on-labels-with-placeholders.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

1.8 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
style
label
placeholder
comment
locked
maxlength
localization
al
w1
all

Label placeholders need a Comment; locked strings need Locked = true

Description

AL Labels accept optional properties — Comment, Locked, MaxLength — that travel with the string to localization. The Comment is the translator's only signal for what %1 and %2 mean; without it, 'Document %1 has errors in %2.' translates unpredictably because the translator has to guess whether %1 is a document number, document type, or document name. Locked = true marks a string as non-translatable — URLs, JSON keys, short command tokens — and keeps the localization pipeline from translating literals that must stay verbatim. MaxLength limits how much of the label survives truncation. The Comment is required whenever placeholders are not self-evident; Locked is required on any non-text value.

Best Practice

For placeholders, write Comment = '%1 = Customer No., %2 = Document Type' alongside the Label. For URLs, HTTP methods, JSON keys, and similar literals, set Locked = true and use the Tok suffix (see apply-approved-label-suffixes). For captions with a tight visual budget, set MaxLength to the enforceable length. When the placeholder meaning is obvious ('Customer %1 not found.') the Comment is optional.

See sample: include-comment-on-labels-with-placeholders.good.al.

Anti Pattern

CustomerLocationErr: Label 'Customer %1 not found in %2.'; with no Comment — translators will not know which identifier maps to which placeholder. HttpsUrl: Label 'https://example.com'; with no Locked — the URL enters the localization pipeline and may be translated into a broken address.

See sample: include-comment-on-labels-with-placeholders.bad.al.