Action ribbon groups

Rob_Hansen

Are the groups that actions appear in on the action ribbon somehow hardcoded into the executable? For example, on a sales order, there are three options that appear in the "Posting" group of actions. I'd like to add a new variation and have it show up in that grouping. I copied one of the existing actions from that group (Post + Print) and pasted it directly below the existing action. I changed the caption and modified the code behind the new action. Unfortunately, the action shows up in the "Process" group and not within Posting.

Do we have any control over this? It seems bizarre that this may be handled by the executable. If it is coded to look for specific naming on actions to place them in special groups (eg. if name = "Post and Print" then render it in a Posting Group), that's a horrible example of hardcoding. I'm hoping i'm missing something and this isn't the case.

Rob_Hansen

Just to be clear, i'm talking about the placement of actions on the "Home" ribbon, not the "Actions" ribbon.

Rob_Hansen

Also, this is in reference to NAV2013. I did a poor job of providing all the details clearly up front.

Rob_Hansen

No responses on this? Is anyone from the Microsoft NAV team reading this thread?

Rob_Hansen

Still no answers on this? Does anyone have an understanding of how this is handled?

bsturzo

Hi,

What you're describing is a good scenario for page configuration in NAV 2013.

In order to get your actions on the Home tab in a group with a customized name (i.e. other than New, Process, Report), you have the following choices:

A. Use the Promoted Category action attribute:
1. Set the Action to have Promoted Category = Category X (one of the values in the dropdown below New, Process, Report)
2. Set the Caption ML for the page categories to map the category with the desired label.

B. Use product configuration:
1. Promote the action to any category.
2. Open RTC in configuration mode.
3. Open the page, right click on the ribbon, and choose Customize the ribbon.
4. Create a new Group on the Home tab.
5. Drag the action to the group you created.
Closing RTC will update the default profile of the user you were logged on with for all the users on that profile.

On Sales Order, for example, the effect you described was achieved through method B.

Let me know if this helped!
Bogdan

Rob_Hansen

I know I have those options...but that's not what I want to do. We have a packaged add-on for NAV and I want to add a new action to the "Posting" group on the "Home" action ribbon of the sales order page. There doesn't seem to be any way to do that in a way that our customers can simply import/merge our objects and have the new action added to that group.

It just seems bizarre that the handling of action grouping for the "Home" ribbons would be hardcoded into the executable in some way.

bsturzo

Hey,
not sure what you mean by "hardcoded" since you can add and remove actions from a given group.

So let's see if I get your scenario right:
You are adding a new action on Sales Order based on "Post and Print" and you would like it to show up by default in the same Home group as the one you copied from?

If this is the case, yes, you need to edit the configuration of the page because the Sales Order action grouping is done through profiles (method B from the ones I mentioned). If it had been done through method A, a simple copy of the action would have done the trick.

Bogdan

Rob_Hansen

So...in terms of wanting to ship objects for our add-on and have them (once integrated) add the new action to the "Posting" group on the sales order page for all users/profiles, I guess we're out of luck? We'd need to instruct the partners/customers to go through configuration on all the pages after integrating our changes? That's disappointing.

bsturzo

For Sales Order unfortunately yes...

On the other hand, why don't you provide your customers with ready-made profiles together with the new objects?

Rob_Hansen

Our add-on is a small utility that simply adds new actions to the document pages. We want existing NAV customers to be able to install it and have the actions available to users, without having to change their users' profiles (which they may have customized from the base NAV profiles anyway). So, we'll just have to accept that our actions will appear in the "Process" group on the home ribbon. It's a shame that there's no property to set when defining actions to indicate which of the Home groups they appear in by default.

bsturzo

Well there is (Promoted Category). The problem is that it's overridden by the profile.

Have you tried using the profile called "ORDER PROCESSOR - NC" (Sales Order Processor - Non-Configured) and then update your tool to promote the action to a category on the home tab?

jreynolds

bsturzo wrote:

If this is the case, yes, you need to edit the configuration of the page because the Sales Order action grouping is done through profiles (method B from the ones I mentioned).

This is indeed unfortunate. In the Worldwide Cronus demo database there are 26 records in the Profile Metadata table for page 42 (Sales Order). So, if I understand you correctly, in order to get a new action to appear in the "Posting" group of the Home ribbon we would need to edit 26 different profiles? And it gets even worse for other pages - the Customer List (for example) has 172 records in the Profile Metadata table.