bcquality/community/knowledge/performance/avoid-growing-globals-in-singleinstance-subscribers.md
Jesper Schulz-Wedde 9a4198eb28 Add [all] sentinel to bc-version; apply to version-agnostic knowledge
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.
2026-04-23 16:00:03 +02:00

1.7 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
performance
singleinstance
subscriber
event
memory
session
al
w1
all

Avoid growing globals in SingleInstance subscribers

Seed article. Ported from BC Code Intelligence to seed the community corpus. Community contributors are invited to expand or refine.

Description

A codeunit with SingleInstance = true is allocated once per session and lives until the session ends. Global variables on it are never collected between event fires. A subscriber that accumulates data into a global — buffering payloads, appending to a list, caching without a cap — steadily grows its session footprint for the entire user session. The symptom is memory that only recovers on sign-out, and it surfaces only on long-running sessions.

Best Practice

Keep the global footprint on a SingleInstance subscriber bounded and intentional: a handful of flags, a setup record, a bounded cache with a maximum size. When cross-event state is genuinely needed, define an explicit reset point — end of a business process, arrival of a specific terminal event — that clears the growing collection.

See sample: avoid-growing-globals-in-singleinstance-subscribers.good.al.

Anti Pattern

A SingleInstance subscriber that appends each event's payload to a global list, dictionary, or temporary record without a cap or cleanup trigger. The list grows for hours, memory pressure builds quietly, and debugging the root cause on a live environment is substantially harder than noticing the unbounded append in code review.

See sample: avoid-growing-globals-in-singleinstance-subscribers.bad.al.