Step-by-Step Guide to Page Customizations for Business Central in AL
Page customizations in Business Central allow developers to tailor page layouts to specific user profiles without modifying core functionality. The post demonstrates how to create page customization objects and profiles in AL code to hide fields and actions, hide financial data from data entry users, and deploy customizations as part of an extension.
post Aardvark Labs
"You can't add triggers, procedures, or actions. This maintains parity with the in-browser Page Customization capabilities."
Key points
- Page customization objects in AL change a page’s layout for a specific profile. Unlike page extensions they have no object ID, so a name prefix is important to avoid collisions.
- They can hide, move and add fields and hide actions, but cannot add triggers, procedures or actions, matching what in-browser customization allows.
- A profile object names a role center and lists its customizations, and users switch to it via My Settings and the Role field.
- One customization can be referenced by several profiles for reuse.
- Profiles and their customized pages can also be managed by hand from the Profiles (Roles) page.
Quotes
- “You can’t add triggers, procedures, or actions. This maintains parity with the in-browser Page Customization capabilities.” (Clarifies the fundamental limitation of page customizations and ensures consistent functionality across all users regardless of their profile)
- “A customization can be listed in more than one profile. This allows you to reuse page customizations for several similar profiles.” (Shows how to efficiently design customizations across multiple user roles without duplicating code)
AL objects mentioned
As named in the post. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.
- page 22 “Customer List”
- page 21 “Customer Card”
- other “ARD_DataEntryCustomerList”
- other “ARD_DataEntryCustomerCard”
- other “ARD_DataEntry”
Context
- Features: Page customization objects, Profile-specific layouts, Field visibility control, Action visibility control, Field repositioning, Role center association
Source: Aardvark Labs, community blog. Summary, key points and quotes are derived (CONTENT-NOTICE.md); read the original for the full text.