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

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Markdown

---
bc-version: [all]
domain: performance
keywords: [singleinstance, subscriber, event, memory, session]
technologies: [al]
countries: [w1]
application-area: [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`.