Adding Custom Actions to the List Item Menu in SharePoint 2010 Using SharePoint Designer 2010
Guest Author: Geoff Varosky
In SharePoint 2010, it is easier than ever to add custom actions that are scoped to a specific list using SharePoint Designer 2010. So today, I am going to walk you through the process.
In a related post on my blog, I showed you how to surface ULS logs using SharePoint Designer 2010, an External Content Type, and an External List. We’re going to use that list as our base for our custom action.
Our phony business case for this custom action is such – We are surfacing our ULS logs into a SharePoint list, and want to collect feedback on specific log entries for later consumption. We need to link to a form elsewhere in the site, which we will pass a reference to the item in question, as a URL.
Note – the List Item Menu refers to the same thing as the Edit Control Block. This is the context menu which is associated with all list items, available in list views and list view web parts.
So, let’s open SharePoint Designer 2010, and navigate to our ULS Logs list, and we’re going to select Custom Action > List Item Menu from the Custom Action button on the ribbon UI
Once we select that link, we are presented with the following form
We’re going to name our custom action Log Entry Comment, and give it a description as well. Now let’s scroll down. You will see that we have 3 different types of actions we can associate with this custom action…
We can
- Navigate to a Form for this list
- We can Initiate a Workflow
- Or, we can Navigate to a URL
We’re going to select Navigate to URL, and enter in our URL, and enter in our bogus URL, and pass a name/value pair of ItemURL={ItemUrl}, which was found by looking into the November 2009 version of the SharePoint 2010 SDK
OH NO! We can’t use it in Beta 2, which is the public beta we are running! Ok, so I guess on the receiving end, we’ll need to fix it up in some other way. So, we’ll just change our URL to pass a few things, and build the URL ourselves.
http://www.grace-hunt.com/ULSLogComments?ItemURL={SiteUrl}/Lists/ULS Logs/DispForm.aspx?ID={ItemId}
there, that should do the trick…
So, set your URL, and then give it a sequence number. This is the number in which it appears in the list. Anything over 10000 is a good practice, so you do not interfere with any other items in the list.
Then click OK, and you now have a custom action, associated with a list item, all without cracking open Visual Studio, deploying a package, etc. etc.
You will now see it on the ULS Logs list dashboard page in SharePoint Designer 2010
So, let’s go check out list… and there we have it, our custom action, associated to the list item menu/edit control block, within our list!
And if we click it, we get an ugly, url encoded version (http://www.grace-hunt.com/ULSLogComments?ItemURL=http%3A%2F%2Fsp2010dev%2D01/Lists/ULS Logs/DispForm.aspx?ID=__cb40004300o4200b7983a57-53e7-de11-8ed4-000c29a9d0f1) of:
http://www.grace-hunt.com/ULSLogComments?ItemURL=http://sp2010dev-01/Lists/ULS Logs/DispForm.aspx?ID=__cb40004300o4200b7983a57-53e7-de11-8ed4-000c29a9d0f1
Another cool thing, which you may notice, is that ALL list items have a globally unique identifier in SharePoint 2010! YES! No more list item IDs starting with 1, and going up from there.
Guest Author: Geoff Varosky
Company: Grace-Hunt, LLC.
Blog: http://www.geoffvarosky.com
Twitter: @gvaro
Geoff Varosky (MCP, MCTS) is a Senior Solutions Developer for Grace-Hunt, LLC (http://www.grace-hunt.com), a Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint and Dynamics Solutions based out of Hudson, MA. He has been architecting and developing web based applications for over a decade, and has been working with SharePoint Technologies for the past 6 years. Geoff is an active member of the SharePoint community, and speaks regularly at SharePoint events and user groups, and maintains a blog on SharePoint at http://www.geoffvarosky.com.
Great post Geoff. Very practical, thank you. I’m still getting used to the layout of SPD and finding the basic buttons in 2010.
Did you mean 1,000 for sequence? The text has ten thousand but image only one. The GUID number for list items (instead of ID int) may through a monkey wrench at some people’s customizations (JS?) post migration but sounds like a smart long term move.
Thanks for the comment Jeff!
I actually used a bad example in my screenshot – should be 10k, not 1k. Thanks for noticing that. Consider this reply errata for this article :)
I do believe that the identifiers will slip a few people up when migrating to 2010, however, unique identifiers for list items OOTB is something that I have been wishing for, among other things, in the new product, and it appears that my wish has been granted!
This is a great post. Thanks.
What if I want to make this link go directly to any associated items in another list and the association is a Title field?
For example you have the url: http://www.grace-hunt.com/ULSLogComments?ItemURL={SiteUrl}/Lists/ULS Logs/DispForm.aspx?ID={ItemId}
Would I change the url to something like: http://MYSPSITEURL/Lists/DESTINATIONLIST/EditForm.aspx?ID={Title}
In this example the title would be a numeric field that coincides to the ID of the destination list.
Any ideas?
Alex,
Thanks for the comment. Through SharePoint Designer 2010, you would not be able to achieve this. The tokens available are limited to ItemId, ItemUrl, ListId, SiteUrl, and RecurrenceId. If you go the code route however, this could be achieved through binding the CustomAction to an assembly.
Can you point me in the right direction for how to bind a CA to an assembly in SP2010?
Alex,
Unfortunately you cannot bind an assembly to an ECB menu item, however, you can do it through toolbars, ribbon options, etc.
Thinking about this a bit more, you could also possibly do this through some javascript and substitution. Possibly by putting some sort of text, such as XXREPLACEXX, or something at the end, and then using javascript to copy the title field from the page, or, do a lookup back to the list for that, and replace it with the title.
There are quite a few ways to skin a cat in this instance.
Hi Geoff,
Came across your post when looking for creating custom action in an external list. I was able to add the custom action successfully. Now, the scenario I am facing is that the end users want to have the custom action as the default action. In other words, they want to get rid of the default items of the List Item menu (Edit, View Item) and have this custom action as the default action to happen when the user clicks on the hyperlink. Any pointers on how to accomplish this would be very helpful.
Hi Filbert
Did you find a solution for the default action?
I am looking to do the same thing – remove the standard menu items, or alter their actions. Has anyone been able to figure this out?
Thanks
Noah – to remove standard menu items you have two options.
1 – through a feature using the HideCustomAction element http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms414790.aspx – this can be done as both a server deployed solution, or, as a sandboxed solution. Either way, this will require you to wrap this feature in a solution and deploy it.
2 – By using JavaScript to ferret out the items in the menu, and hide them.
Some references – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768565.aspx
For Filbert and Jacob – again, you will need to hide out what is there using some of the above-described methods, and then you can add in actions as needed. Either via the use of custom actions, or, via BCS actions.
Good walkthrough – http://sladescross.wordpress.com/category/custom-action-hide-ecb-item/
Hope this helps!
Great post….do you have any information or instruction for creating a custom list item group where I can have multiple custom list actions contained within. Also, I noticed while trying to work with the sequencing, using 10000 places the custom list item at bottom of default option however using 1000 places the custom item in between a few of the default options. Can you provide any guidance also on using ‘Sequence options’ for Custom Action list items? Thanks a bunch
Mark – I’ll take it from bottom to top.
Eric Kraus wrote a great powershell script which I make use of often, which will generate a list of all custom actions contained within your farm. This can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ekraus/archive/2010/05/03/list-all-customactions-in-the-farm.aspx
You can then single out what location/group/etc. you are using to find out what is there already, and sequence yours accordingly.
Now – if you have the same sequence number as another custom action, whichever one comes first alphabetically within the features directory is going to go first. They will not cancel each other out.
As for grouping list item menu options – this cannot be accomplished through CustomActionGroup unfortunately. You may want to check over at Jan Tielen’s blog – http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/ I am fairly certain he did have a post on it a while back as far as how to do it.
god, sharepoint sucks so hard. using a guid instead of a decent id is as braindead as it gets.
Thanks Geoff.
We just got SharePoint and are learning all the tricks. Next is to make the button dependent on a field, but this was a great starter as was your other post.
Thanks so much.
Gary
Sorry everyone – it appears I owe a lot of people, a lot of replies from here. These were ending up in my junk mail folder. Let me start from the bottom up!