What's New: Business Central User Experience (2024 release wave 2)

Overview

The video covers user experience updates in Business Central 2024 release wave 2, in four parts: access keys and keyboard shortcuts, search modernization, column resizing and page layout controls, and drag-and-drop file attachments.

Access keys, available since 2023 only in English, extend to additional languages. Search moves to a full-text index on designated columns, matching individual words, and is announced as a rolling deployment starting with items, customers and sales orders. A new page layout parameter for the web client is planned for 25.1. The new attachments component, demoed in the video, accepts multiple files and folders, and the legacy attachments factbox is being obsoleted.

Key points

• Access keys were available since 2023 only in English; this wave extends them to additional languages, with key combinations for system actions kept consistent.
• Search uses full-text search on designated columns instead of character matching, matching individual words. It is announced as delivered in waves from October, starting with main data tables such as items, customers and sales orders, and other tables later.
• Column resizing is faster and stored locally in the browser. It still depends on personalization when enabled, but now works on pages where personalization was not possible, such as copilot prompt dialogue pages.
• A new web client parameter controls page layout (analysis mode, standard list, tiles, tall tiles) via direct links. It is announced for version 25.1.
• The new attachments component supports drag-and-drop of multiple files or whole folders in incoming documents, the document attachments factbox and the email send dialogue.
• The legacy document attachments factbox is being obsoleted. Admins can hide it through personalization once users are used to the new component.
• AL developers get new action properties for multiple file uploads: allowed file extensions and a trigger to process the selected files. The video says these were explained in the 2024 release wave 1 developer tools video.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• table “items” at 3:54
• table “customers” at 3:54
• table “sales orders” at 3:54

Not found in BC28-30: table “items”, table “customers”, table “sales orders”.

Quotes

• 0:27 “this feature was available or is already available in business Central uh since 2023 but only in English and with this wave we are”
• 2:08 “we introducing a search that is based on a full text search technology rather than marching characters this allows for the search to be”
• 3:54 “this feature is coming in waves uh it will be delivered starting from October and it will show up for multiple tables in business”
• 5:50 “this feature is coming in 25.1 so you will expect that uh release a little bit uh later than than just uh at the”
• 6:11 “drag and drop uh functionality to attach multiple files in business Central uh makes it easier to manage files or even folders”
• 9:32 “these are basically the places where more than 90% of uh business Central users actually uses uh to upload uh files the files can”

Disclaimers in the video

• 3:54 coming-later: this feature is coming in waves uh it will be delivered starting from October and it will show up for multiple tables in business Central starting from the main data like items and customers and sales orders and then uh being available also for other tables later on during this wave
• 5:50 coming-later: this feature is coming in 25.1 so you will expect that uh release a little bit uh later than than just uh at the beginning of October
• 9:52 not-in-this-release: the Legacy document attachments part of the factbox is now getting obsoleted so it’s perfectly fine to go to a personalization settings and once your users get used to the the new document attachments you can hide uh the old one

Presenters (as heard): Baj Kota, Ian.