Personalize pages
You can personalize your workspace to suit your work and preferences. Change pages so that they display only the information you need, where you need it. Personalization affects only your workspace. It doesn't change how others work. You can personalize all types of pages, including the role center page.
Due to restrictions on design capabilities in the web client, it's currently not feasible to customize or personalize the controls within the grid and fixed syntax. It applies to all design modes, not just personalization.
You can make various changes, such as move or hide fields, columns, actions, and entire parts, and add new fields. Most personalization must be done by first activating the Personalizing banner. You can make simple adjustments, such as the column width, immediately on any list.
Administrators can make the same layout changes as users by customizing a profile (role), which can be assigned to multiple users. To learn more about pages for Roles, see Customize Pages for Profiles.
Administrators can also override or disable users' personalization, and they can define which features are even available for users to see in all or specific companies. For more information, see Customize Business Central.
To see ways you can personalize, see Personalize your Role Center in Business Central.
Change the width of a column
You can easily resize columns on any list. Just drag the boundary between two columns to the left or the right.
In the header of a list, select and drag the boundary between two columns.
Alternatively, double-click the boundary between two columns to autofit the width of the column. The width adjusts to the optimal size for readability.
As for other personalization, the changes you make to column width are stored on your account and follow you no matter which device you sign into.
Start personalizing by using the personalization mode
Open any page that you want to personalize.
In the upper-right corner, select the settings icon, and then choose the Personalize action.
The Personalizing banner appears at the top to indicate that you can start making changes.
Note
To navigate during personalization, use Ctrl+Click on an action if it's highlighted by the arrowhead. If you see a lock icon or a dash icon on the banner, you can't personalize the page. For more information, see Why a Page is Locked from Personalization.
To change a UI element, point to the element, such as an action, a field, or a part. The element is immediately highlighted with an arrowhead or border. Choose the element, and then choose either Move, Remove, Hide, Show, Show under "Show more", Show when collapsed, Show always, Set/Clear Freeze Pane, or Include/Exclude from Quick Entry, depending on the type and state of the UI element.
To add a field, choose the + Field action. From the Add Field to Page pane, drag and drop a field into the desired position on the page.
When you finish changing the layout of one or more pages, select the Done button on the Personalizing banner.
For more information, see What You Can Personalize.
Personalize action bar and menus
Personalization lets you decide which actions to show on the navigation and action bars and on Role Centers, and where to show them. You can show, hide, or move individual actions or action groups.
To see how to personalize actions on pages and Role Centers, see Action bar & menu updates.
Personalizing the navigation and action bars is done basically the same way as with other UI elements. However, what you can do with an action or group depends on where the action or group is located. The best way to find out is to enter personalizing mode and then let the arrowheads guide you.
There are a couple terms that you should be familiar with to better understand action personalization: action group and promoted category.
An action group is an element that expands to display other actions or groups. For example, on the Sales Orders page, one action group is the Functions action that appears when you select the Actions action.
A promoted category is an action group that appears before the vertical line on the action bar. The categories typically include the most commonly used actions, so that you can quickly find them. For example, on the Sales Orders page, the Order, Release, and Posting actions are promoted categories.
To clear personalization, select the arrowhead around the part's designer menu, and then select Clear personalization.
Tips and other points of interest
To help you better understand personalization, here are some helpful pointers.
When you make changes to a card page that you open from a list, the changes take effect on all records that you open from that list. For example, let's say you open a specific customer from the Customers list page, and then personalize the page by adding a field. When you open other customers from the list, the field that you added is also shown.
Changes that you make affect all your Role Centers. For example, if you make a change to the Customer list when the Role Center is set to Business Manager, you also see the change on the Customers page when the Role Center is set to Sales Order Processor.
Changes to a page in a pane take effect on the page wherever it's shown.
You can't personalize a page that's in analysis mode. The Analyze switch is deactivated. If you happen to switch to personalization mode while the page is in analysis mode, then analyze mode is automatically switched off.
Some pages have multiple page fields that map to the same source table. The pane shows both/all of those page fields independently. Showing/Hiding/moving those fields is also independent without one affecting the other.
If a part or group is hidden, ghosted fields will still show inside it, but you can't drag-drop or add/show that field until you make the group/part visible.
Use Designer
When developing extensions in the AL development environment, you have a wide range of possibilities. Designer in Dynamics 365 Business Central complements the development experience in Visual Studio Code. It provides an easy and convenient way to make immediate changes to your design by dragging and dropping the components on the page.
Currently, Designer is only available from a Dynamics 365 Business Central sandbox. Every time you start designing, you're effectively creating a new extension. Your changes are immediately visible to other users in the sandbox environment. Designer can't be used by multiple users at the same time in sandboxes.
Extensions created by using Designer are removed when the sandbox environment is updated or relocated within our service. Thus, you shouldn't rely on using the sandbox environment as a source control for these Designer extensions. Remember to frequently download and back up the Designer extension source. For more information, see Production and Sandbox Environments.
Important points to note
Some key points to be aware of in regards to the Designer tool.
Every time you start designing, you're effectively creating a new extension. Your changes are immediately visible to other users in the sandbox environment.
The changes you make in Designer apply to all users.
You can't remove specific fields that are bound to a page and a field must belong to an underlying table.
You can only add fields, columns, or tiles to its applicable view from list, tall tiles, and wide tiles views. Some components can't be moved using drag-and-drop and are restricted to the view that they're in.
You can only add fields/columns, from a predefined list, which is based on the source table. You can't create new ones.
In the client, users can change many of these settings for their workspace by using personalization. For more information, see Personalize your workspace.
Start and stop designing
In the Business Central client, you start Designer by selecting Settings icon and then Design in the top-right corner of any page and start designing using drag-and-drop components. In Visual Studio Code, you can start Designer by using the F6 shortcut key, which launches a browser that opens the Business Central client in Designer.
After you're done with the changes, choose Stop Designing. You can name the extension and download code to save it for the tenant. Once you're done, the extension is automatically installed. If you choose to download the code, the project is downloaded as a .zip folder. You extract the files and open the folder from Visual Studio Code, where you can deploy it as you would do with any other extension.
If you choose not to download the code at the end, you can still pull the code using the Alt+F6 shortcut. You can also uninstall the extension from the Extension Management page or even download the source from there. You can find Extension Management page by choosing the search Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature and typing the page name.
Drag-and-drop components
In Designer, you design and modify the current page by using drag and drop components. You can display existing table fields, move fields around, remove fields from the page, hide and move actions, and much more.
Work with fields
To add a field or column to a page, in the banner, choose Field. A pane to the right appears that lets you add fields. Here, you can see all the fields that are available for the specific page. The fields displayed are based on the underlying table or tables. The field can have a status of Placed, which means that the field already exists on the page. A status of Ready means that the field doesn't exists on the page and can be added. To add a field, drag and drop it to the preferred location.
If you want to remove a field or column, select the arrowhead indicators on the component, and then select Remove.
You can edit the caption of a FastTab (FastTabs divide key information in separate groups and are arranged in columns) by selecting the caption and start writing. A caption should provide a short and clear description. For more information, see Field Arrangement on FastTabs.
Set the freeze pane
Set freeze pane locks one or more columns to the left, even when you scroll horizontally. You can set the freeze pane, by selecting the arrowhead indicators of the column that you want as the last column of the freeze pane, and then choose Set Freeze Pane. If you want to set the freeze pane back to its original designed location, select the arrowhead indicators for the current freeze pane column, and then select Clear Freeze Pane.
Set the Importance on a field
Fields on nonlist type pages, such as card and document type pages, include Designer options for setting the importance. The following table describes the options for setting the importance in Designer and how it corresponds to the Importance property in the page code.
Set the Quick Entry on fields
You can use Designer to set the QuickEntry property on a field. The QuickEntry property determines whether the field is skipped when users select the Enter key to navigate through fields on a page. You use Quick Entry to speed up the data entry by keyboard and to focus only on the frequently used fields.
To set the QuickEntry property from Designer, select the field or column heading, and then choose either Include in Quick Entry (sets the QuickEntry property to true) or Exclude from Quick Entry (sets the QuickEntry property to false).
For more information about the QuickEntry property, from a user perspective, see Accelerating Data Entry Using Quick Entry.
Work with the Navigation menu and Navigation bar
Designer lets you add actions that link to pages and reports in the navigation bar using the bookmark icon on the target page or report. The bookmark icon is also available in the Tell Me window.
Bookmarking is only available for pages and reports that are discoverable from Tell Me (the search icon on top right). For more information on how to make pages and reports searchable, see Add pages and reports to Tell me.
This feature also allows the user to efficiently create multiple links and group together the important or commonly used links for a specific profile in the Role Center navigation bar. For more information about bookmarking, see Bookmark a Link to a Page or Report on Your Role Center.
You can also move actions to reorder them in the navigation bar, or move them into groups or subgroups to design the Navigation Menu.
Hide and show Parts
Designer lets you hide and unhide part controls in a page directly from the client. When you select the Hide option on a part, it's grayed-out and disappear from the page when you quit Designer mode. Similarly, you can select Show on a grayed part control to make it visible again to the user.
The extension generated when the user hides or shows a part overrides the Visible Property in code. For more information on how the Visible Property affects the visibility of a control, see UI Customization and Visibility of Controls.
Work with Actions
Designer lets you make changes to the actions that are defined in the action bar of a page. You can move, remove, hide, and show individual actions or action groups.
You can't modify actions that are defined on pages that are shown in parts, such as in FactBoxes or embedded lists.
In Designer, to run an action as normal, select the action and press Ctrl+Click.
Move actions and action groups
Designer lets you move actions within the action bar. For example, you can:
Move an action from an action menu to a promoted category.
Move an action from one promoted category to another.
Move an action within an action group or to a different action group.
To move an action or action group, drag and drop it to the wanted location, just like with fields and columns.
You can move individual actions into the promoted categories, but you can't change the order of the actions in the category.
You can't move an action group into a promoted category.
To move an action or action group into an empty action group, drag the action or action group to the target group and drop it in the Drop an action here box.
On Role Center pages, you can't move actions among the different areas that are defined by the area(creation), area(processing), and area(reporting) controls.
Preview design on different display targets
The display type icons let you preview the changes you made on desktop, tablet, and phone clients. This way you can make sure that your design works on the intended display target(s). You can flip to display tablet and phone designs in portrait and landscape orientation.
Control user access to Designer
Accessing Designer is controlled on a user or user group basis by the EXTEN. MGT. - ADMIN permission set. If a user is assigned this permission set, then Designer is available for the user in the client. To prohibit a user from Use Designer, just remove the user from the EXTEN. MGT. - ADMIN permission set.
It's important that the EXTEN. MGT. - ADMIN permission set doesn't have a company specified; otherwise the user won't be able to access Designer.
The EXTEN. MGT. - ADMIN permission set was introduced in Business Central as a replacement for the D365 EXTENSION MGT permission set in earlier versions.
Some other things to be aware of about the Power Automate item in action bar:
You can't hide or move the Automate item or the Power Automate subitem and its actions Create a flow or Manage Flows.
You can move flows included under the Automate item, but you can't hide them. Moving the flow makes a copy of the flow to the destination, it won't remove it from the Automate item. Your flow in Power Automate isn't duplicated.
If the action is moved to the repository area of the action bar, a new action is created at the drop location.
If the action is moved to the promoted area, a new actionref is created at the drop location. This actionref points to a new base action that's appended to the Actions menu (Processing action area).
Important
You can hide the Automation item from users, but not Use Designer. Learn more at Set Up Power Automate Integration.