How can I add a tab to Tridion's Contact View?

Question

SDL Tridion 2011 SP1

I'm trying to add a tabpage to the ContactView page in Tridion, using a GUI extension. I've managed to add the extension to a ComponentView using:

<ext:tabpages>
  <ext:add>
    <ext:extension assignid="ContactWishlist" name="Wishlist Info"
                   insertbefore="InfoTab">
      <ext:control>/WebUI/Editors/ContactWishlist/ContactWishlist.ascx</ext:control>
      <ext:pagetype>ContactWishlist.WishlistInfo</ext:pagetype>
      <ext:dependencies>
        <cfg:dependency>ContactWishlist.WishlistInfo</cfg:dependency>
      </ext:dependencies>
      <ext:apply>
        <ext:view name="ComponentView">
          <ext:control id="MasterTabControl"/>
        </ext:view>
      </ext:apply>
    </ext:extension>
  </ext:add>
</ext:tabpages>

But when as I change 'ComponentView' into 'ContactView', nothing shows in front of the 'Info' tab within the Contact screen (no errors either). Does Outbound Email require a different setup for GUI extensions?

Answer 1

The ext:view attribute sets the scope of when the Extension will try to be loaded.

Try changing the ext:view ComponentView to * and see if it loads. The Tridion docs don't have a definitive list of Views and we can guess from the list in the folder Tridion\web\WebUI\Editors\CME\Views.

Answer 2

Well, there are few things you need to take into account:

• To extend any existing Editors, you need to create your own extension Editor. This extension Editor will contain all the needed files for your tab and configuration file, with resource groups and extension nodes.

• Indeed, OE is a different Editor. So you should carefully set the target Editor which you want to extend:

<ext:editorextensions>
   <ext:editorextension target="OEEditorName">...</ext:editorextension>
</ext:editorextensions>

Besides that View name and Control ID should be correctly set.

• You can specify path to your control as relative to the Editor where it defined. You just need to put "~" mark at the start:

<ext:control>~/ContactWishlist.ascx</ext:control>

It should be done because preceding path is configurable and could be different on different setups.

Answer 3

I believe the Outbound Email Contact view is actually an extension itself, so you probably need to extend the OE editor rather than the standard CME one