Adding item to list view context menu

Question

SharePoint 2010 question here. I have a document library with a number of documents, and I want to add an entry to the list item context menu (the dropdown menu that contains the "View properties"/"Edit properties" etc). I got the impression that this could be done by adding a content editor web part containing the following JavaScript:

<script language="javascript">

function Custom_AddDocLibMenuItems(m, ctx)

{
  var strDisplayText = "Custom menu item";
  var strAction = "alert('Yo')"; 
  var strImagePath = "";

  // Add our new menu item 
  CAMOpt(m, strDisplayText, strAction, strImagePath);

  // add a separator to the menu
  CAMSep(m);

  // false means that the standard menu items should also be rendered
  return false; 

}

</script>

...as per Link. This code adds a new context menu item, as expected. However, I need the context of the item which was clicked in order to access a specific column of the list item. The end goal is to provide a custom filter URL to a different list which is based on the selected item.

The context information is supposed to be available through the itemTable object. But for some reason, this item is not available either through the Custom_AddDocLibMenuItems body or strAction. Any ideas?

Answer 1

In SharePoint 2010 you can use SharePoint Designer to add custom actions. The following article explains how to add custom action for an external list but the procedure is the same for any other list.

With custom actions you can open a list form of the current list, open a different URL or initiate a workflow, however AFAIK you cannot call a JavaScript if that was your intention here.

Answer 2

As Toni say, Custom Actions is the way to go.

If you want to access the context menu on items in a list, you need to define that as location for your custom action manifest. As far as i remember this is the ECB (EditControlBlock) location.

Here is a list of all custom action locations.

Answer 3

It seems you want to fetch the value of the History field using Javascript. You might want to use the ListData.svc for that purpose. Although the code below needs to be modified to retrieve it for the selected value, you should get the general idea from it:

<script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function() {
    $.getJSON("http://yourserver/_vti_bin/ListData.svc/YourListName/",function(data) {
      $.each(data.d.results, function(i,result) {
        var history = result.History;
      });
    });
  });

The link provided in the previous answer from someone else is really not the definitive list to all custom action ids.

I would suggest to dowload the spreadsheet from my blog post at: Download Custom Action Ids spreadsheet

Finally, I suppose you only want to add this specific piece of functionality to one document library else I would suggest to build a feature (download CKSDev for VS2010 to make things easy) and think about adding a custom action that contains a scriptlink to inject your clientside stuff.