How can you extend the default behavior of Tridion.Cme.Commands.Open.prototype._execute()?

Question

I have written a GUI extension which adds an additional tab to many of the Item views in the SDL Tridion CME (e.g. Component, Page and Schema etc.). I have also written some JavaScript which loads that tab directly if when the view is loaded with a tab name is specified in the URL.

The result is that if a page is loaded with the tab name added as follows:

http://localhost/WebUI/item.aspx?tcm=64#id=tcm:1-48-64&tab=InfoTab

Rather than the default of

http://localhost/WebUI/item.aspx?tcm=64#id=tcm:1-48-64

The Info Tab will be loaded on top, instead of the General Tab. This is performed with the following code snippet and works very well:

$evt.addEventHandler($display, "start", onDisplayStarted);

// This callback is called when any view has finished loading
function onDisplayStarted() {

    $evt.removeEventHandler($display, "start", onDisplayStarted);
    var tabname = $url.getHashParam("tab");
    if (tabname != '') {
        var tabControl = $controls.getControl($("#MasterTabControl"), "Tridion.Controls.TabControl");
        tabControl.selectItem(tabname);        
    }
}

Now I would like to make a context menu item to open items and link to the tabs using my new functionality. My first thought was to construct the Item URL myself and simply open a new window in my execute method. So I looked at the default functionality in the standard Open.prototype_execute() functionality of the GUI. This is stored in the navigation.js file of the CME, and is performed by the Tridion.Cme.Commands.Open.prototype._execute method. The code is a lot more complicated than I had anticipated as it deals with shared items, and permissions etc.

Rather than just copying all of this code to my own function, I was wondering if there is a way to elegantly extend the existing Open.prototype_execute() function and append my “&tab=MyTab” to the $cme.Popups.OPEN_ITEM_OPTIONS.URL constant for my own functions.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

At the end the Open command uses $config.getEditorUrl(item_type) to get the url for the item view (item_type - $const.ItemType.COMPONENT, etc). There are no extension points for this part of the functionality, but you could always try to overwrite it on your own risk.