Learn Prism for AL

Using Prism for AL

Cursor, tooltips and context menus

Whenever you see a hand cursor, you can left-click and/or there is a context menu available. Right-click will activate the context-menu.

Many UI elements have tooltips, both in the code views and elsewhere in the UI. Hover the cursor over the element and the tooltip will show after a small delay.

Adjusting window dividers

You can drag the workspace window dividers to resize the object and outline panels. To further safe space on a small screen, use the View menu to collapse e.g. the outline panel:

The object outline can be opened in a separate window using the View | Outline menu.

Filter/search syntax

To help you narrow objects shown in the objects panel, results in the usages windows etc, Prism for AL allows you to enter filter expressions.

All matching of search expressions against strings is case-insensitive. The following kinds of filter syntax is used:

Substring search: Matches any string that has the search string as substring.

SubstringWithWildcardSearch: Allows ? and * as wildcards for single character and zero or more characters. Example: H?l* is matched by Hello.

NameNumberSearch: This is the most flexible search expression which can match against both text and id (numbers). This is used to match against entities that have a number in addition to a name, such as objects and table fields:

You can search both entity name and number
For names, you can use * and ? as a wild-cards
For names, use space to separate words; we implicitly add wildcards around each word
For numbers, you can use .. for ranges
You can use | as an or operator

Example: When matched against objects, 18..20|..4|cust entr is matched by Codeunit 19 (because 19 is between 18 and 20), XmlPort 1 (because 1 less than 4) and Page "Customer Ledger Entries" (because name includes 'cust' and 'entr' in that order).

Shortcuts

The main window and the workspace window have several shortcuts available for their menu items. These are printed following the menu item name.

Additional shortcuts are available for recent items in the main window:

Shortcut	Description
Ctrl + 1	Open recent workspace (1^st from the top)
Ctrl + 2	Open recent workspace (2^nd from the top)
Ctrl + <n>	Open recent workspace (n^th from the top)

The following shortcuts are available for closing windows:

Window	Shortcut	Description
Workspace window	Alt + F4	Closes the focussed workspace window. Depending on the setting Confirm closing workspace you will be prompted to confirm.
Main window	Alt + F4	Closes the main window including all workspace windows. If any workspaces are open, depending on the setting Confirm closing workspace you will be prompted to confirm.
Any other window	ESC	If the setting Escape closes window is checked, then Escape closes the currently focussed window/dialog/pop-up.