I think that everyone of you reading this post remember yesterday’s post about the new “Save as you type” feature introduced with Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2 release.
This post generated lots of reactions (inside and outside Microsoft) and now I’m happy to announce the following Microsoft’s internal decision:
We have listened to your concerns and made a decision to give admins control to toggle the change on or off, so that we can strike a better balance between improving the consistent data saving experience and give our community time to adjust to the change. We will reintroduce this in the November update (v21.1), but now under a switch in Feature Management, making it optional until version 23. It will be set to ON by default for new environments in v21, and OFF for environments upgraded from v20 – similar to other changes listed in the Feature Management page.
Now on the change itself, we would like to demystify this a bit and will soon publish additional documentation changes and guidance – even explaining what has been changed and why. But for now, in essence please note that:
- This change is intended to improve the data saving experience based on issues that our customers and partners have reported, including strengthening various multi-window and concurrent user scenarios, consistency across clients, and a more accurate save indicator that gives learning users the confidence that Business Central frequently saves their changes. It also gives an accurate signal for developers debugging data commit changes to the database.
- We appreciate that some of the concerns arise from specific and sporadic code patterns applied to the OnModify trigger, such as contacting external services, displaying dialogs, updating empty fields, or performing heavy processing. We will be documenting best practices to help you apply code to the preferred triggers, so that you can achieve the same outcome in harmony with this change and the benefits it is intended to bring.
- This improvement doesn’t change anything in the logic in the web client or cause compile errors. Granted, you will see the save operation happening more often now in the desktop web client or on mobile, but the general pattern is not new.
- Because Business Central never had any “Save” button, the pattern of autosaving data has existed from the beginning. Forms were always saved as soon as possible and, in many cases, while being edited (for instance, when users navigated from sales header to lines, moved across lines, initiated an action, popped out a window,, etc.)
- This improvement also has no impact on anything not related to web client user interactions. Background sessions, web services, or AL code remains unaffected. It is only reinforcing a user interaction pattern that already existed, for instance, in the Outlook client or popped-out pages.
- We hope that introducing a feature switch will give you the ability to experience this improvement, test your code or solutions, and prepare for the change on your own terms.
To be clear: The feature will be disabled with an hotfix net week (these are the plans) and then available to activate optionally via Feature Management starting from 21.1.
Microsoft listens, and this is the power of this lovely community…
Thanks Blazej 😉
UPDATE October 25, 2022: An hotfix that switches the released feature OFF in existing environments and delivers an option to turn it on/off via Feature Management has now been released in all regions. See screenshot below and try it in your own environment:
Stefano Demiliani 