bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/upgrade/do-not-make-external-calls-in-upgrade-codeunits.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
upgrade
upgrade
httpclient
external-service
dotnet
availability
al
w1
all

Do not make external service calls inside upgrade codeunits

Description

The upgrade scope has to complete for the tenant to reach the new version. Any call in the upgrade path that depends on an external service — HttpClient to a partner API, a DotNet interop call, a codeunit that fetches remote configuration — fails closed when the service is unreachable, misconfigured, or slow. The failure blocks the upgrade for every customer whose environment cannot reach the dependency at the moment the upgrade runs, and there is no user present to retry. The scope is specifically code inside codeunits with Subtype = Upgrade or reachable from their triggers.

Best Practice

Defer external calls to runtime code that executes after the upgrade — install-triggered tasks, background job queue entries scheduled by the upgrade, or lazy initialization on first use. The upgrade step should compute a local result or mark work to be done, not perform the remote call itself.

Anti Pattern

HttpClient.Get(...) or DotNetType.CallStaticMethod(...) directly in OnUpgradePerCompany, or in a local procedure called from it. The upgrade now depends on network availability to a service the platform does not control.