CustomAction Development Resources for SharePoint

A common development task is building out custom actions for SharePoint. What is a custom action you ask? Per Microsoft: “A custom action represents a link, toolbar button, menu item, or any control that can be added to a toolbar or menu that a user sees. Custom actions can be bound to list type, content type, file type, or programmatic identifier (ProgID).” (source)

A good example of a custom action feature in SharePoint is a recently released project to CodePlex – GraceHunt.SharePoint.Features.SiteActionsRecycleBin, which adds a link to the Site Actions menu on any site collection it is activated in, to provide a link to the recycle bin of the current site.

The reasoning behind this post was to list a few great resources which help in building custom actions for SharePoint.

John Holliday has a great (sortable and exportable to excel) list of all of the custom action identifiers, available here: http://johnholliday.net/resources/customactions.html, which lists the Id, GroupId, Location, Sequence, RegistrationType and RegistrationId of all of the Custom Actions built into SharePoint.

You can also build custom action features to hide elements within SharePoint menus, toolbars, and link menus. John Holliday has a great article on locating custom action identifiers to allow you figure out how to find the identifiers for installed custom actions within SharePoint, available here: http://johnholliday.net/post/2007/10/28/How-to-find-lt3bCustomActiongt3b-identifiers.aspx

This can also be useful to assist in figuring out the sequence number for installing your custom action feature in SharePoint, so you can insert it before or after other items that are currently there.

And last, but certainly not least, MSDN has some excellent resources regarding custom actions

• Custom Action Definitions
• Default Custom Action Locations and IDs
• How to: Add Actions to the User Interface
• CustomAction Element (Custom Action)

I hope this is useful information, and if you have any resources that should be added here, just leave a comment below, and I will add it to the list.

[Updated 1.28.09]
Over at SharePointDevWiki.com, there is a growing amount of information regarding custom actions.

• CustomAction (includes undocumented CustomAction locations and id’s)
• CustomActionGroup

Jan Tielens has a good article on Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to Application Pages in SharePoint Central Administration.

André Vala wrote a great post about CustomActions as well, including some great in-depth information on each of the attributes and rights for actions in his post SharePoint 2007 Deployment: Custom Action Features