I cannot believe that is has been 4 years since I wrote my last tip on my blog… 6 years for the one before that…

Life has a funny way of getting back at you. And here I am writing a blog post again.

Why? Well, maybe because for the first time in like… forever… it seems like my mind is not playing tricks with me anymore.

So here we go… about the Company Badge… or should we say… the System Indicator…

Where am I?

For as long as I can remember there has been a need for a “Where am I” sort of feature telling a user, consultant or developer in which environment they are using.

In the old Navision days, the menu was also a Form object and we would simply add a text control to the form telling if it was a production system, or test, or something else.

In fact… about two years ago I did a short freelance project with the classic client and forms. It was an absolutely horrible experience.

But with time the product has changed, evolved, became difficult (Role Tailored Client) and then easy again when Microsoft started engaging more with the community.

Company Badge

With Business Central this feature is called “Company Badge” and it allows you to add up to 6 characters into an indicator that will show with a certain color.

You can find the Company Badge on the Company Information page and when populated it will show in the top right corner and when selecting companies.

Square or Round?

The reason for this blog post to begin with, is the shape of the Company Badge. The screenshot I am showing in the image is confusing and misleading.

It leads to to believe that a Production system is a Square indicator and the Test is a Round circle… but the exact opposite is true.

To be honest, I never have it much thought until this week.

At my current job we are running/implementing different tenants. Two at the moment, and six/seven when we are finished, which will take a few years.

And with these systems I was wondering… why are some of my systems Round? And some Square?

This seems to be tightly coupled with the fact that you are working on a sandbox or a production system.

And in case of this screenshot, we are using a production system for an active implementation (this is for performance reasons, sandboxes are slower) and I have converted an on-prem PROD system to a sandbox causing a sandbox to be called PROD.

Not everything is what it seems…

If you look at the code in Business Central using Statical Prism you’ll see that the Company Badge is actually the good old System Indicator and the fact that you can only use 6 characters is just a few lines of code and a variable.

Company Badges & CI/CD

With a lot of production systems and even more sandboxes it can be a nuisance to keep the Company Badges in line and up to date. But you can automate part of that… which I will hopefully find the time to blog about in one of the next moments I find inspiration.