bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/style/apply-approved-label-suffixes.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

1.7 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
style
label
textconst
suffix
msg
err
qst
tok
lbl
txt
aa0074
al
w1
all

Suffix every Label and TextConst with its approved usage tag

Description

CodeCop rule AA0074 requires every Label and TextConst to carry a suffix indicating how the value is consumed: Msg for Message calls, Err for Error calls, Qst for Confirm or StrMenu prompts, Tok for locked tokens (URLs, JSON keys, short literals with Locked = true), Lbl for captions and tooltips, and Txt for telemetry strings. The suffix is not decoration — it is how the compiler, linter, and reviewer detect misuse (a Tok value passed to Error, a Msg used as an error label). The cost of adopting the convention is one short suffix per declaration; the cost of ignoring it is that every reviewer has to inspect every call site to judge appropriateness.

Best Practice

Name every Label and TextConst with one of Msg, Err, Qst, Tok, Lbl, or Txt at the end. Pick the suffix that matches the consuming call, not the look of the string. When multiple suffixes are grammatically valid (Tok vs Lbl for a short caption on a locked token) the choice is a judgment call; the violation is missing a suffix or using one inconsistent with the call site.

See sample: apply-approved-label-suffixes.good.al.

Anti Pattern

CannotDeleteLine: Label 'Cannot delete this line.'; — no suffix, used with Error. Text000: Label 'Update complete'; — generic name with no suffix at all. WrongSuffixTok: Label 'Customer %1 not found.' used with Error — a Tok suffix on an error label.

See sample: apply-approved-label-suffixes.bad.al.