The upcoming Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2 release (alias version 21) will introduce some improvements on the user interface. The first that you immediately noted is the new company switcher, very appreciated from a lot of users and that helps on changing companies between environments quickly:
But in order to help increasing productivity on the web client, this is not the only new feature that you will find in the upcoming release.
Dynamics 365 Business Central version 21, together with the new AL Language extension version 10.X, introduces a new way of promoting actions and placing as desired in the user interface of your pages.
To show how this new feature works, I’ve created a simple page and on it I’ve defined 4 actions as follows:
Now I would like to create 2 categories of actions that appears immediately to the users when they open the page. In the first category I would like to add actions 1 and 2, in the second category I would like to add actions 3. Action 4 will not be promoted.
Now, you can do something like in the following code:
In the Promoted area you can define groups and you can add references to actions inside that group by using the new actionref keyword. The actionref keyword defines a reference in the promoted area to an existing action on the page.
Result of this code?
When I open my page, I have the two groups immediately visible. If I select Group 1, I can see my actions as in the following picture:
If I select the Group 2, I can see the other action on it (as per AL definition):
and if I select the Actions group (standard), I will see my not promoted action and the access to all the other actions defined:
I think that this new way of defining actions on pages can help on increasing productivity and can help on making users happy. Give it a try…
Stefano Demiliani 