As I mentioned last week, one of the elements we can use for an effective Onboarding is the banner. And no, I’m not referring to Dr. Bruce Banner, although it’s up to us to make sure users don’t become the Hulk because of bad design.

Why use a banner ?

The banner provides a first impression, the welcome to our extension. We must take care of what we are going to propose to the user so that the first moments of use are focused on the purpose with which we want to endow the banner.

Last Mile Concept

As in a race, the last meters are the most important, they are the ones that take us to the finish line. We can have trained, planned the race rhythms, controlled hydration or supplies but if we do not cross the finish line the effort will have been in vain.

We can also have the simile of home delivery, it is useless to have a good product, with its design, manuals and instructions if we are not able to deliver it in time and form.

In the case of Business Central, it is the banner that will begin to make those last meters, the one that is launched to go the last mile.

Banner design

First, we have to be clear about what we are going to show: last instructions, reference to more documentation, finish the configuration…
And this is where both functional and technical profiles have to be fully aligned.

And this is where both functional and technical profiles have to be fully aligned and I add : business/product profile as well. We must keep in mind that the banners are related to the checklists that I will talk about in another post.

The high-level format is as follows and is usually assigned to a specific role of the extension.

The subpage which contains the banner is Checklist Banner (1990, CardPart de Page 1990 «Checklist Banner») it’s in the system extension and in Visual Studio we cannot see its code.The code can be queried in the Github repository.

How to add checklists /checklist

To get our banner configured we must create a new checklist item using the Administration page b of checklists for example or we can personalize it using AL as Demiliani tells us in this post.

We can set the order of the checklist to be displayed or the role in the checklist will be displayed . 

I will skip in this post to go in detail about how we can customize or create/manage the checklists, I have to leave it for the next post.

Back to banner page

Well, we have already seen that we can customize a part of the banner with the checklists. And the text on the left? That would be cool, wouldn’t it? Particularly for specific extensions or rolecenter.

We will find in this page we can’t see where these texts are being defined. Looking a further scratching through Github we will see that in the codeunit 1996 «Checklist Banner» if you define them: As text labels 😢(Both for demo and commercial companies) Since as we mentioned the banner behaves in a different way if the company is of one type or another.

We must continue our research

A high-level strategy would be the standard code and the work of Erik Hougaard and Stefano Demiliani(for links, please check the references section) but I find complications because this text updates depending on the progress of the checklists, butIs it possible to add the Codeunit Checklist Banner (codeunit 1996 «Checklist Banner») and calling its functions : Updatelabels …?

That is a problem since these functions are called in Page 1990 «Checklist Banner» (and it is not extensible).

However there is an additional problem, the codeunit 1996 «Checklist Banner» has been defined as Internal. And I believe Microsoft is not allowing to modify texts at this moment.

I’m planning to do more research and I feel it would be a good functionality to submit to the Ideas area of the D365 Community.(Done here and vote)

Next steps

In the upcoming post we will discuss checklists in more depth, focusing on the functional, business and not only the technical or coding aspects.

There is a lot of things to talk about Onboarding and I will write more posts and publish some videos to Tech Sphere Dynamics YouTube channel.

We continue in this Race… this is AMAZING.

References:

https://demiliani.com/2022/05/25/dynamics-365-business-central-handling-a-checklist-for-your-apps/
Dynamics 365 Business Central: handling a checklist for your apps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vgK2ap1cIc
Onboarding Checklist – Hacking Session in AL and Business Central

https://github.com/microsoft/ALAppExtensions/tree/main/Modules/System/Guided%20Experience

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/onboarding-experiences