In Sitecore how to open a custom Sitecore app by right clicking on a content item? - sitecore

Question

I want to be able to right click on a content item in Sitecore and then select something like "Run My App" in the context menu. Then in the app that runs I need to be able to reference the content item that was right clicked. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Yes you can do this, its not as hard as it sounds.
You want to drop into the Core database and open up the content editor. The right click menu is defined within the sitecore/content/Applications/Content Editor/Context Menus/Default
The items within that folder are what you see when you right-click an item in the tree. So you can add a new item there with a template of Menu Item.
If you look at the existing ones, most of them send a message to the Sitecore Desktop. These messages are the commands defined in /App_Config/Commands.config. I can't see anything in there that would just launch another Sitecore application, so you would need to create a new command to do that. To create one, just inherit from the Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Commands.Command class. That passes in a CommandContext which will holds a collection of Items.
public class DemoCommand: Command
{
#region Overrides of Command
/// <summary>
/// Executes the command in the specified context.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="context">The context.</param>
public override void Execute(CommandContext context)
{
Assert.ArgumentNotNull(context, "context");
var parameters = new NameValueCollection();
if (context.Items != null && context.Items.Length == 1)
{
var item = context.Items[0];
parameters["id"] = item.ID.ToString();
}
Context.ClientPage.Start(this, "Run", parameters);
}
#endregion
public CommandState QueryStat(CommandContext context)
{
Assert.ArgumentNotNull(context, "context");
return CommandState.Enabled;
}
protected static void Run(ClientPipelineArgs args)
{
Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");
SheerResponse.CheckModified(false);
SheerResponse.Broadcast(
SheerResponse.ShowModalDialog(
"[Path to your application here]"
),
"Shell");
}
}
To get the item passed over, in your message call - just pass the variable $Target.
So the field Message in the Menu Item would be something like:
item:runMyApplication(id=$Target)
Hope that makes sense :)