Compliment from Microsoft
Headlines are the new part of Role Center. They show the most interesting data insights for a particular role, a user. This is, as you want, Hot news for MSDyn365BC user!
For example, when Sales Manager logins to Business Central in the morning he sees greeting and fresh news
- Best-selling item
- Yesterday’s revenue
- Top customer
- etc.
But after lunchtime, headlines will show new information – all insights about current day.
Frankly speaking, now (at prerelease) user see only greeting and link to Business Central documentation. But that’s enough to understand what headlines are and how to extend them.
Below is what I found myself, and this is not official Microsoft documentation.
Headlines, the basics
Technically headlines are
- pages with new type HeadlinePart
- are shown on the top of Role Center
- contain one or more text fields to cycle through
From a user point of view, they are beautiful top news about their business.
I found next headline pages in D365BC
So, 9 role centres now have headlines.
Let’s look at Business Manager Role Center (page 9022). First part is headline part. Nothing special, just new part page Headline RC Business Manager (page 1440).
If we look at it, we will not see something special
except PageType = HeadlinePart
This type makes next magic to the page
- all fields will be placed in a cycle
- only one field is shown on the page at one moment of time
- a field value is shown per 8 sec, then it becomes invisible and next field is shown per next 8 sec, and next, and next J
- to show specific field user can click on the beautiful dot
You can group fields to control the visibility of them.
For example, a standard group for Greeting text will be visible only for the first 10 minutes after user logins. After that – it disappears.
Here, how it works:
OnAfterGetRecord it checks visibility.
How to hide standard headlines
Note, that here we have
[IntegrationEvent] OnIsAnyExtensionHeadlineVisible(VAR ExtensionHeadlinesVisible : Boolean).
Why is it there?
It allows to disable standard headlines and shows only custom headlines.
If you want to do so, simply subscribe to it and set ExtensionHeadlinesVisible = true.
How to add a new headline
Some notes about designing headlines
- Consider user role and interests
- Make them a bit of ‘wow’
- Max 75 chars, per 1 headline
- Add maximum 3-7 insights
- Great for describing trend, aggregation, correlation
- Add drill down and text emphasis
- Separate the content from the main message
To add a new headline, we should add a new text field to Headline page.
As a result, we will see next headline
Good, but we can do more.
How to change the name of headline
Do you see that every headline has its own name? By default it is HEADLINE
It could be also be changed with GetHeadlineText function in Headline Management codeunit.
So, the first argument is the name of the headline, second is the text of headline.
If we will change our code to the next one
The result will be
How to emphasize part of the headline
If we want to highlight part of headline we should use Emphasize function in Headline Management codeunit.
For example, next code
will generate next headline
As we’ve added a hyperlink on drill down we can click on a headline, and new page will open.
I did not found a solution how to add 2 or more different drilldowns for one headline if we want to emphasize 2 or more insights.
May be this is not possible, cos one headline should be about one clickable insight.
Greetings
There is one standard headline, I want to describe more detailed. This is greetings headline.
It greets user, differently depending of time, and disappears after 10 minutes from logging.
Good morning! – between 00:00 and 10:59
Hi! – between 11:00 and 13:59
Good afternoon! – between 14:00 and 18:59
Good evening! – between 19:00 and 23:59
All this is calculated in GetUserGreetingText function in Headline Management codeunit.
Unfortunately, we cannot call it from extensions development, cos it is not external.
Conclusion
Headlines are very cool.
But, please think, when you add them. Think about the user, about his job, about what he cares.
Headlines can increase user productivity at times.
They can become the main business news feed for the user, and the reason why he will choose Dynamics 365 Business Central.
