bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/ui/promoted-action-groups.md

bc-version	domain	keywords	technologies	countries	application-area
21..	ui	action-groups area-promoted actionref showas split-button group-caption navigate-group entity-group	al	w1	all

Use Standard Promoted Action Group Names And Placements

Description

Business Central ships a fixed vocabulary of promoted action groups, and users build muscle memory around where each kind of action lives. When you define area(Promoted) groups, reusing the standard caption and placement for a given action class makes the page feel native; inventing your own caption or putting an action in the wrong group forces every user to relearn your page. Frontier models tend to emit plausible-but-nonstandard captions (Go To, Vendor Actions, Related) instead of the established BC names, which is exactly what breaks cross-page consistency.

Best Practice

Map each action to its conventional group and use the exact standard caption: Home/Process for data-modifying and workflow actions (entity/card/document pages use Home, lists and worksheets use Process); an entity-named group (Customer, Item, Order) for navigation tied to the current record (statistics, ledger entries, dimensions); Navigate for related pages that are useful regardless of the selected record; Report for printing and analysis; and the workflow groups Posting, Release, Approve, Request Approval, and Prepare for their respective document lifecycle actions. Standard guidance recommends ShowAs = SplitButton for Posting (Post / Post and Print / Preview) and Release (Release / Reopen), while the other common groups normally render as standard groups. Use a split button elsewhere only for closely related alternatives with an obvious primary action. The first enabled and visible action becomes the primary button, so place the expected default first and remember that extensions or personalization can reorder it. Within a common group keep the same action sequence you see on the matching base-app page (for example, mirror Sales Order for a sales document) so order stays predictable.

Anti Pattern

Custom captions for what is really a standard group (Vendor Actions instead of the Vendor entity group, Go To instead of Navigate), posting or statistics actions dropped into the wrong group, or many tiny one-action groups that fragment the ribbon. The reviewer signal is an area(Promoted) block whose group captions do not match the base-application names for the same page type, or a split button whose actions are unrelated or lack an obvious primary operation.