Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

UsageCategory property vs Windows Client Departments demystified

This post has the goal to address FAQ related to elements displayed in Windows Client Department UI considering UsageCategory property for pages.

NOTE: this community post refers as latest update considering version 14.x.

UsageCategory property has been implemented to make objects searchable through the Tell Me (ALT+Q) feature within Web Client.

Another capability - side feature- that has been made possible through UsageCategory is to mimic MenuItems entries within the Windows Client.

To know more about this property, please visit

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/properties/devenv-usagecategory-property

With version 14.x, when compiling an extension, a file is generated inside the .app file called navigation.xml.

You can inspect the existence of this file in the following way:

Rename your .app file into .rar file
Use 7-zip to extract files from the .rar file

Below a simple example (NOTE: your extension might have different folders and files)

Considering this simple example, there are in the src folder 5 pages named: Mod111, Mod222, Mod333, Mod444, Mod555. All of them has CaptionML and XLIFF entries specified.

Editing navigation.xml file, you might find out that is made of several entries.

These entries has been generate because of UsageCategory property enablement in Pages and Reports. All of them has an auto-generated ControlGUID parameter as per image snippet below

These entries are used to display the page and report items within Departments in the same order

IMPORTANT: ControlGUID is recreated every time the extension is built (CTRL+SHIFT+B).

CONCLUSIONS

Since ControlGUID is randomly created behind the scene every time the extension is packaged / built there is no control in the Departments page in relation of the sort order of the pages for a specific sub category (Lists, Administration, etc.).

Moreover, every time the extension is rebuilt and deployed, controlGUID are randomly generated hence the sort order could be different when publishing the extension again within the same or in a different version.

Quick Links

Leaderboard > Small and medium business | Business Central, NAV, RMS