bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/upgrade/skip-non-essential-work-during-upgrade-context.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
upgrade
executioncontext
upgrade
reportselections
initialization
install
al
w1
all

Skip non-essential initialization when ExecutionContext is Upgrade

Description

Initialization code that inserts default rows — report selections, number-series, setup-table defaults — is correct on first install and harmful during upgrade. Existing tenants already have these rows, possibly customized; re-running the initialization either fails on primary-key conflicts or silently overwrites customer configuration. The platform exposes GetExecutionContext() so the same procedure can be safely called from install and upgrade paths without duplicating the insert logic.

Best Practice

Check if GetExecutionContext() = ExecutionContext::Upgrade then exit; at the top of idempotent-on-install-only procedures. Keep the early exit narrow and document the reason. The check should be additive to existing guards, not a replacement for proper primary-key handling in the insert itself.

See sample: skip-non-essential-work-during-upgrade-context.good.al.

Anti Pattern

A procedure that unconditionally inserts a default report-selection, number-series, or setup row, called from both install and upgrade paths. On upgrade it either throws on the conflicting key or overwrites the tenant's existing configuration.

See sample: skip-non-essential-work-during-upgrade-context.bad.al.