Adding new items to ELMA left menu

In this article, we describe how to add new items to ELMA left menu using a web module.

Attention

Note, that using a visual editor you can configure existing toolbars (add or remove them) in the web application. Read more about it in ELMA Help.

It's necessary to add new items to the left menu using web modules only if you develop your own extensions to ELMA.

To add a new item, you need to create a new web module and add a component that implements the IMenuItemsProvider extension point. You can learn more about creating web modules in this article.

For our module, the implementation of IMenuItemsProvider extension point is below:

[Component]
        public class MyMenuItemProvider : IMenuItemsProvider
        {
            public void Items (MenuItemFactory factory)
            {
                factory.Action<HomeController>(c => c.Index()).Order(100).Container("left");
            }

            public List<string> LocalizedItemsNames
            {
                get
                {
                    return null;
                }
            }

            public List<string> LocalizedItemsDescriptions
            {
                get
                {
                    return null;
                }
            }
        }

IMenuItemsProvider extension point contains 3 methods:

Items() – we use it to add a button to the left menu (using Container(“left”) parameter), specify the item’s index number and set a link to the Index action of Home Input parameter is of MenuItemFactory type – it is a standard menu builder in ELMA;
LocalizedItemsNames() and LocalizedItemsDescriptions() – these are obsolete methods and are not used any longer.

You also need to mark a controller’s method (in our case it is Index method) with the EleWise.ELMA.Web.Content.ContentItemAttribute attribute and specify the menu item’s name and path to icons:

[ContentItem(Name = "My menu item",
                    Image16 = RouteProvider.ImagesFolder + "unk16.png",
                    Image24 = RouteProvider.ImagesFolder + "unk24.png",
                    Image32 = RouteProvider.ImagesFolder + "unk32.png")]

You can also check the module that we used for this article – it is attached to the article.

Adding new items to ELMA left menu

Attachments