bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/style/use-named-invocations-instead-of-object-ids.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

1.5 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
style
object-id
page-run
report-run
codeunit-run
named-invocation
al
w1
all

Invoke objects by name, not by numeric ID

Description

AL supports calling Page.RunModal(525, ...) or Report.Run(206, ...) with a bare numeric ID. The platform accepts the number, but the call site loses every signal that makes the code reviewable and refactor-safe: the reader cannot tell which object is being invoked without looking up 525 in the object catalog, and the renumbering of an object in a future release (legal in AL — IDs are not a stable contract) silently retargets the call to a different object. The Page::"..." / Report::"..." syntax compiles to the same runtime call but makes the target explicit and binds by name, which is the stable identity.

Best Practice

Write Page.RunModal(Page::"Posted Sales Shipment Lines", SalesShptLine) and Report.Run(Report::"Sales - Invoice", true). Apply the same rule to Codeunit.Run, XmlPort.Run, and similar runtime invocations. Reserve numeric IDs for diagnostic tooling that genuinely needs them.

See sample: use-named-invocations-instead-of-object-ids.good.al.

Anti Pattern

Page.RunModal(525, SalesShptLine); — the reader has no idea what page 525 is without a lookup, and a future rename of page 525 or renumber of "Posted Sales Shipment Lines" produces a silent mismatch.

See sample: use-named-invocations-instead-of-object-ids.bad.al.