Form captions, naming conventions

All forms must have captions. The form caption displays in the title bar or tab of the form (depending on whether you are viewing forms in Classic or Tabbed UI format).

Note: The form name and the form caption do not refer to the same thing. The form name is an internal designation and does not appear as such in the customer UI, except in the design mode. The form caption is what appears in the form's title bar and other references to the form in the UI.

When you create a form, whatever wizard you are using to create the form typically assigns the form name you assigned to it as the caption. This, however, is not necessarily the most desirable way to caption a form. For example, the form name of the form commonly known as the Users form is actually "UsersMaint", which would probably be confusing to most users.

Because of this, we recommend that you recaption the form as soon as possible after creating it. The best way to do this is with a translatable string, so that the form caption can translate automatically if the user's display language changes. These translatable strings are stored as string objects in the Strings table.

Translatable strings used for form captions typically begin with a lower-case 'f'. This convention indicates to the system to look for the corresponding form caption string in the Strings table.

Note: Form captions that are not designated as translatable strings are treated as literal values, and thus not translatable.