Writing Custom Actions

By now you should be familiar with the various SharePoint components such as the ribbon, the Site Actions menu, and the context menu that appears in a list (more accurately the Edit menu). All these components represent various important tasks within SharePoint and form an indispensible part of the SharePoint user interface. These are also the components that you may need to modify or add to when customizing your SharePoint application.

SharePoint provides a rich, consistent, and simple mechanism to customize these components through custom actions. According to Microsoft a custom action represents a server ribbon, menu, or link customization that a user can see.

---

Try It Yourself: Write a Simple Custom Action

You will now develop your first custom action by adding a link to the Site Actions menu. The link simply takes the user to the ChangeSiteMasterPage.aspx application page from where the user can change the master page for the site.

Follow these steps:

1. Create a new Empty SharePoint project called FirstCustomAction.

2. Right-click the project and add a new item of type Module. Name it CustomActionModule1.

3. Delete the Sample.txt file and edit the Elements.xml as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <CustomAction
       Id="MyCustomAction"
       Description="This a shortcut to the change master page screen"
       Title="Change Master Page"
       GroupId="SiteActions"
       Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu"
       ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/icsmrtpg.gif"
       Sequence="10">
    <UrlAction Url="~site/_layouts/ChangeSiteMasterPage.aspx"/>
  </CustomAction>
</Elements>

4. Deploy the project through Visual Studio. This should activate the feature associated with the custom action. Browse the site and open the Site Actions menu (see Figure 6.1). You should be able to the see your new custom action as a menu item in the Site Actions menu. Clicking on the menu item takes you to the ChangeSiteMasterPage.aspx.

Figure 6.1. Newly created Change Master Page Custom action

---

Now take a look at XML. The <CustomAction> tag defines a new custom action. The Id attribute specifies a unique identifier for the custom action. The Title and Description attributes specify the text and description for the custom action. The GroupId is an optional attribute that specifies the group that contains the custom action. In this case the group is SiteActions. The Location attribute along with the GroupId specifies the location where the custom action appears. In this case the location is Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu. You can find the list of the default custom action group IDs that are used in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb802730.aspx.

The other attributes you can see are the ImageUrl attribute, which specifies the icon for the custom action, and the Sequence attribute, which specifies the ordering priority for the custom action. In addition you can see the UrlAction element, which specifies the URL to which the custom action points.

In addition to the ones just mentioned, there are many other attributes and elements that we see later on in this hour.