Create a Custom Action to Satisfy Your “All People” Needs.

Thanks for the intro Carl! Much obliged! Well, in your SharePoint world, your “Pale Blue Dot” view of all of the people in your site collection is the “All People” view, you know, the User Information List.

Almost two months ago, I wrote an article on how the “All People” link in SharePoint 2010 is, well, it’s gone MIA. It is easy to get to via  link. And, if you’ve got one site collection to manage, well, its as simple as adding a link somewhere, like in a link list within a management site somewhere, or, up in the handy dandy bookmarking feature, in those fancy things all the kids are using these days, “web browsers”… whatever that means…? Anyways. So, you need to get there, but, wouldn’t it be nice and simple to add in a link to say, I don’t know, the Site Settings page? Wow! That’d be cool! Then I can access it with all of the other Users and Permissions links! Right in one place?! WOW!

So, the question becomes, how can we get it there? (HINT: I mentioned it in the title of this article!)

Ok, so I gave it away, shame on me, I spoiled the ending. Boo hoo. Yes, Custom Actions! That’s how we’ll get it there!

So, what to do? Well, not too much actually. The creation of Custom Actions in SharePoint 2010 and with Visual Studio 2010 has become, well, easy. Extremely easy in fact due to the fine folks who created the CKS:DEV project over at Codeplex. Why? Well, because it contains item types with fancy pants wizards to allow you to click a few buttons, and create a custom action project with ease. You really do not even need to be a developer to do this, it’s quite easy, and hey, I provide screenshots and code. Go ahead, do it!

So, let’s get started, shall we? Oh, you need a glass of water first. No problem. I’ll be here waiting for you.

… 15 minutes to get a glass of water? seriously? Did you pump it from the well?

Ok, so, make sure you have VS 2010 installed, as well as CKS:DEV. NO, I am not waiting this time. You lollygagged around with getting a glass of water last time… You had your chance!

First, create a new project in Visual Studio 2010

Then, create an Empty SharePoint Project

Oh, guess what you’re about to witness? Yes, you in the back in the Charlie Brown polo shirt! You’ve got it. The creation of my next codeplex project for Grace-Hunt (yes, I know, it’s been a while!)

And since we do not need to elevate privileges, or any of that fancy stuff required for a server-side deployment, we’re going to create this as a Sandboxed Solution…

Next, once our project is loaded in the Visual Studio IDE, let’s add a new item to the project.

Right click on your project, go down to Add, then select  New Item.

On the next screen you are presented with, make sure you have SharePoint and 2010 selected under Installed Templates.

Select Custom Action, and give it a name (such as UserInfoList). Then click Add.

Now, again, thanks to the fine folks who created CKS:DEV, we have wizards!

On the first screen on the wizard, we have 6 settings we are going to make use of, detail from here for each of these attributes: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms460194.aspx

On the next page, we do not actually need to set this option, however, I wanted to, to showcase this functionality. This utilizes the SPBasePermissions class to show whether this can be viewed to the user, based on the permissions they have for this object, in this case, the site collection.

On the last screen, and this is the important part, we need to specify the URL we want to have our CustomAction link to, this is the URLAction element. The ~sitecollection is a Token. More information on what tokens can be used in a URLAction can be found on slide #30 of my Creating Custom Actions in SharePoint presentation.

Now that we’ve finished defining the custom action, we just have a couple of more things to do. Since we do not our feature to be called “Feature1”, right-click on Feature1 in the Solution Explorer, and choose Rename.

Type it in, hit enter, all good.

Next we want to remove Feature 1 from after the title of our feature. Double click on the UserInfoList feature we just renamed, and we get a designer view of our feature (new in VS 2010).

In the Title field, remove Feature 1 after our feature, and add a description. Also, change the scope from Web to Site, which means we will deploy our solution to the site collection. Which also means, this link will appear for all Users and Permissions sections throughout all of the site settings pages within our site collection.

Now for the money! Right click on the project and select Deploy.

Look at the output window to see if we had success or failure…

And now look at your site settings page – there is our new link!

And that’s it! I will have this project published to Codeplex within the next few days, so, please keep an eye out.