bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/ui/titles-have-no-trailing-punctuation.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

1.4 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
ui
title
caption
page
dialog
punctuation
ellipsis
al
w1
all

Titles carry no trailing punctuation and no trailing ellipsis

Description

Page titles, section titles, FastTab titles, and dialog titles in Business Central are labels, not sentences — they have no trailing period, question mark, or exclamation. Trailing ellipsis ("…" or "...") on a title is specifically a long-standing Windows convention for action buttons that open a dialog, and AL handles that via the action's runtime behaviour rather than the caption text. Adding the ellipsis literally into a page caption or action caption is wrong in both directions: the platform also displays its own ellipsis when appropriate, and the static three dots corrupt translations that adjust punctuation for the locale.

Best Practice

End titles with the last word of the title. Sentence case per the capitalization rule for the phrase type (see caption-capitalization-noun-phrase-vs-sentence-phrase). If a dialog needs "…" behaviour, rely on the platform; do not type the characters into the caption string.

Anti Pattern

Caption = 'Setup wizard...', Caption = 'Sales orders.', page Caption = 'Customer list:' — all three decorate the title with terminal punctuation that is noise to the reader and a translation headache.