Application Page deployed to Central Admin does not show

Question

Hi Guys I have this problem:

I want to deploy a custom application page to the SharePoint Central Administration. I found these 2 links: http://kamilmka.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/how-to-deploy-a-application-page-to-central-administration/ and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff798467.aspx and did everything they said.

No problems occured during deployment or activation, however the link to the page does not show in the Central Administration.

I checked and found out that the page is deployed to the \14\TEMPLATE\ADMIN\ReminderConfiguration folder as it should, but the custom action does not appear to work. Here is the xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <CustomAction Description="Here you can change the xml of the timer job."
                Id="ReminderTimerConfigurationLink"
                Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Monitoring"
                Sequence="1000"
                GroupId="TimerJobs"
                Title="Reminder Timer Configuration">
      <UrlAction Url="_admin/ReminderConfiguration/ReminderConfiguration.aspx" />
  </CustomAction>
</Elements>

All the names appear to be correct.

I tried to create my own Custom Action Group and place the Links there, still nothing worked. The feature activates with no problems and the logs show no errors as well.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

it took me 2 days, but I figured it out. It turned out quite simple:

Everything with the code was ok. The problem is that the feature had to be activated by default in the Administrative Web site(the feature was scoped as Web).

If you have a problem like this, you just add the following code to the Feature Manifest as a Feature attribute:

AutoActivateInCentralAdmin="TRUE"

Example:

<Feature xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" AutoActivateInCentralAdmin="TRUE" Description="Will contain the modules in the project" Id="[GUID]" Scope="Web" Title="Modules">
 ...
</Feature>