bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/ui/caption-capitalization-noun-phrase-vs-sentence-phrase.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

1.6 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
ui
caption
capitalization
title-case
sentence-case
noun-phrase
al
w1
all

Capitalize captions by phrase type: noun phrase is Title Case, sentence phrase is Sentence case

Description

Business Central UI captions follow a simple capitalization rule that depends on the grammatical shape of the caption, not its location. A caption that is a pure noun phrase — no verb — uses Title Case: each major word capitalized (Sales Orders, Chart of Accounts, Payment Terms). A caption that is an imperative or declarative sentence phrase — contains a verb — uses Sentence case: only the first word and proper nouns capitalized (Post and print, Send email, Create flow). Following the rule makes unrelated captions feel consistent; ignoring it is visibly inconsistent in the user's navigation.

Best Practice

Decide by parsing the caption as a phrase. "Sales Orders" is a thing; Title Case. "Post and print" tells the user to do something; Sentence case. For captions that are literally a single noun (Save, Close), treat them as sentence phrases — the imperative verb is implied.

See sample: caption-capitalization-noun-phrase-vs-sentence-phrase.good.al.

Anti Pattern

Writing Caption = 'Sales orders' on a list page (noun phrase styled as a sentence) or Caption = 'Post And Print' on an action (sentence phrase styled as title case). Both read as typos to a native English reader and inconsistent to a translator.

See sample: caption-capitalization-noun-phrase-vs-sentence-phrase.bad.al.