How to Define a Custom Action Add-in in the Manifest

 

Applies To: System Center 2012 SP1

Custom actions are add-ins that display on the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) console as ribbon buttons. When the user clicks the button, the custom code that is defined in a Microsoft .NET assembly will be invoked. For more information about how to create an assembly that can be called by a custom action, see Base Classes.

To add a custom action add-in to the manifest file

1. Inside the root XML node of the manifest file, create a node named ActionAddIn.

2. Add an attribute named Name to the action node. The value of this XML attribute must be the name of the T:System.Addin.AddinAttribute attribute from the assembly that is identified by the AssemblyName XML attribute.

3. Add an attribute named Contexts to the action node, and set the value to one or more context values. For more information about which context values you can use, see Context values.

4. Add an attribute named ActionType to the action node, and set the value to Code.

5. Add an attribute named AssemblyName to the action node, and set the value to the assembly that contains the code that is identified by the Name attribute. This is the file name of the assembly without the extension.

6. Optionally, add the Icon, SmallIcon, or ShowInContextMenu attributes.

7. To set the accessibility (shortcut) keys for the ribbon button, add the AccessKeys attribute and set the value to the shortcut keys as described in the Context values topic.

See Also

Scenario: Define an Add-in
How to Define a Manifest
How to Create an Action Add-in
How to Use Context Objects
Context values