bcquality/community/knowledge/ui/split-button-standard-groups.md

bc-version	domain	keywords	technologies	countries	application-area
21..	ui	showas splitbutton promoted-actions actionref posting-actions release-action action-bar	al	w1	all

Reserve ShowAs = SplitButton For Standard Posting And Release Groups

Contributions welcome — open a PR to refine or extend this article.

Description

Setting ShowAs = SplitButton on a group inside area(Promoted) renders a primary one-click button with a dropdown of related alternatives, where the FIRST actionref in the group becomes the primary (left) button. Business Central users have learned this pattern from the two standard groups it ships with — Posting (Post, Post and Print, Post and Send, Preview Posting) and Release (Release, Reopen). Inventing new split-button groups for unrelated actions, or ordering the dropdown so the most common action is not first, breaks that learned muscle memory and makes users guess what the left button will do.

Best Practice

Use ShowAs = SplitButton only when all hold: the actions are genuinely variations of one operation, there is an obvious most-frequent primary, and the dropdown stays at roughly two to four items. Place that primary action as the first actionref so it occupies the left button; order the remaining refs by descending frequency. Outside the Posting and Release conventions, treat a new split-button group as something to justify, not a default — a plain promoted group or category is usually the safer choice and keeps the action bar predictable.

Anti Pattern

Grouping unrelated actions under one split button to save toolbar space — for example pairing Post with Delete, or Release with Print — so the left button performs whatever happens to be listed first. The reviewer signal is a group with ShowAs = SplitButton whose member actionrefs do not share a verb or workflow, a primary that is not the most common action, or a dropdown padded well beyond four items. Each makes the immediate left-click unpredictable and costs the user the very click the split button was meant to save.