Classifying data

Data privacy is a huge concern for people today. With countless online systems collecting and tracking data from everyone in the world, people want to know that their data is safe and private, and that if they choose to remove their data from a system, it can be done.

Business Central contains features that help you build applications that are compliant with the regulatory requirements for the collecting and handling of personal information.

As an AL developer, you have the ability to identify the type of data that is stored in any new table or field that you create. We will look at how to do this in this recipe.

Getting ready

You're going to need an AL project to work in that's connected to a development sandbox. We will continue to build on the project that we started in this chapter. You can download it from the GitHub link at the start of this chapter.

How to do it...

1. Open your AL project in Visual Studio Code and select the Television Show.al file in Explorer.
2. For each field that we added to the Television Show table, we need to add the DataClassification property and assign it a value of CustomerContent, as follows:

DataClassification = CustomerContent;

In the event that a field has multiple properties, the order in which the properties are listed does not matter; however, the properties must be listed before any triggers that are defined.

3. Define the same property to the overall table by adding the following to your AL file, before the fields section:

DataClassification = CustomerContent;

How it works...

By specifying the DataClassification property for the table and the fields within the table, we have now made our application compliant with data privacy regulations. There are multiple classifications that can be applied to data:

• CustomerContent: Content created by users of the system
• EndUserIdentifiableInformation: Data that can be used to identify an end user (for example, username and IP address)
• AccountData: Data that is part of a customer's billing and payment information (for example, name, address, and email)
• EndUsePseudonymousIdentifiers: An identifier that can be used in conjunction with other information to identify an end user (for example, user GUID and user SID)
• OrganizationIdentifiableInformation: Data that can be used to find a tenant (for example, Tenant ID).
• SystemMetadata: Data generated by the system that cannot be linked to a user or tenant

There's more...

Having the developer define the type of data that your tables and fields contain within the application is just the first step in maintaining data privacy. Business Central contains another feature that lets customers further define the sensitivity of the data in their system. The data sensitivity of a field can be set to one of the following levels:

• Sensitive
• Personal
• Confidential
• Normal

See also

For more information on the two methods for classifying data in Business Central, see the following pages of the Microsoft Docs website:

• Developer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-classifying-data
• Customer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-classifying-data-sensitivity