bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/security/never-hardcode-secrets-in-al.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

1.5 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
security
secrets
credentials
hardcoded
label
apikey
al
w1
all

Never hardcode secrets in AL

Seed article. Converted from an existing security-review prompt to bootstrap the BCQuality security corpus. Domain stewards should expand, restructure, and refine as needed.

Description

A secret embedded in AL source — API key, password, connection string, token — lives forever: in the app package, in source control history, in every debugger session that sees the assignment, and in any log that captures the containing variable. Rotation is effectively impossible without a new release, and the blast radius covers every tenant the extension is installed in.

Best Practice

Retrieve secrets at runtime from a protected store: Azure Key Vault for production workloads (see prefer-azure-key-vault-for-production-secrets) or IsolatedStorage for tenant-local encrypted values (see use-isolated-storage-for-module-and-company-secrets). Carry the retrieved value in a SecretText variable end-to-end (see use-secrettext-for-credentials).

See sample: never-hardcode-secrets-in-al.good.al.

Anti Pattern

Assigning a secret literal to a Text, Code, or Label variable (including labels marked as constants). The secret is now part of the compiled app and indistinguishable from non-sensitive content to callers and tools.

See sample: never-hardcode-secrets-in-al.bad.al.