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Forms, Views & BPF

Forms

  • DGT-CUS-110 — One main form per persona, not one form with everything on it hidden per role. Use role-based form assignment so each audience sees a form built for them. A single form padded with tabs no one uses is harder to maintain than two focused ones.
  • Use quick-create forms for fast inline creation, quick-view forms to surface related record data read-only, and keep card forms lean for views on phones.
  • DGT-CUS-120 — Logic belongs in code, not click-configured rules, once it's non-trivial. Simple field-level show/hide/require can be a business rule (it runs both server- and client-side); anything with branching, lookups, or service calls belongs in a TypeScript form script. Register only OnLoad in the designer and wire the rest in code.

Views

  • Distinguish system views (travel with the solution, shared by everyone) from personal views (a user's own, not part of ALM). Ship the system views the app needs; don't try to manage personal views.
  • DGT-CUS-130 — Keep view columns lean — every column is a query column. A view with thirty columns is slow and unreadable; design for the columns people actually scan.
  • Configure Quick Find deliberately: its find columns determine global search behavior for the table, and too many find columns make search slow.
  • Set a sensible default view per table, and order views the way users work.

Business Process Flows (BPF)

  • DGT-CUS-140 — A BPF models a cross-table process as ordered stages. Keep stages few and meaningful — a stage per database field is process theater, not process guidance.
  • A BPF is itself a table (prfx_..._process, see Naming Conventions); its instances are rows, and it can carry its own plugins. Be aware of the platform limit on active BPFs per table and per environment, and retire BPFs you no longer use rather than leaving them deactivated.
  • A record can be on multiple BPFs; the user switches between them. Don't model parallel processes as one branchy flow if they're genuinely separate.

Modern UI only

DGT-CUS-150 — Build for the Unified Interface model-driven app and use the modern designers. Don't invest in classic-only form or view features or the classic designers — they don't carry forward, and Microsoft has deprecated the classic experiences.