This post we’ll go through how to add a new custom icon, next to the lock, compound, … icons.

This is not something that can be done with configuration in ICN. It needs some customization which is near hacking but that will give us what we want.

First step, if you are intending to display an icon based on a custom property, you will have to, either add the property as an icon so it gets fetched, or customize ICN to fetch it, this is explain here.

When this is done, you can proceed to the customization of the client to use the property and display the icon. This is a 2 step process.

• Aspect the factory of IconValue which is the multiStateIcon method of the class ecm.widget.listview.decorators.common to add your icon when toString is called on the returned object
• Aspect the createResultSet method of the class ecm.model.ContentItem to increase the size of the first column of the Content list view

First will result in this customization, here I’m using an existing class (ecmRecordIcon) since we are not using it, but you can add some css code in the css of your plugin and use your own icon of course:

// No need to use .prototype on common since it's already a Singleton, no instance are create with new
aspect.after(common, "multiStateIcon", function (result) {
    aspect.after(result, "toString", function (resToString) {
        if (this.item && this.item.attributes.MultiFiledIn) {
            resToString += '<img class="ecmStatusIcon ecmRecordIcon" alt="Multi Filed In Document" title="Multi Filed In Document" src="' + this._blankGif + '" />';
            resToString += '<div class="dijitHidden">Multi Filed In Document</div>';
        }
        return resToString;
    });
    return result;
});

The second will look like this:

// ContentItem.createResultSet is a static method from ContentItem, no need to aspect the prototype
aspect.after(ContentItem, "createResultSet", function (result) {
    if (result && result.structure && result.structure.cells && result.structure.cells.length > 0) {
        var s = result.structure.cells[0][0];
        s.width = "71px"; // 71 is good for one new icon, add 16 per icon
        s.widthWebKit = "71px"; // You can also reuse te value and just add 16px to make it more flexible and cleaner
    }
    return result;
});

And this is it. This way the IconValue will add your icon when its toString is called, and the resultSet will add some extra space to make sure it is still displayed on one line.

Sometimes, we want to use a custom property to decide if an action should be displayed, enabled or hidden. The items provided by ICN as parameters of these functions are items as they are shown in the view, as rows. They don’t have all properties fetched, only the system ones and the ones you configured to be shown as extra columns (since they have to be fetched in order to be displayed).

As you may have noticed when overriding the isVisible and isEnabled functions, they are synchronous and they expect an immediate return. That means fetching the attributes using the item.retrieveAttributes function won’t work since it’s an asynchronous function (there is one round trip made to the ICN server to fetch them).

In this post, we’ve seen how to fetch custom attributes for all rows without showing them in a column. We will now see another way to do this, by making the ContextMenu actually asynchronous. Since the isVisible and isEnabled functions are synchronous, we will actually retrieve the attributes before showing the Context Menu for the item.
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This post explains how to fetch a custom property you’ve added on a class for all documents retrieved by ICN, before all attributes are actually retrieved using the ContentItem.retrieveAttributes function. That means all items when displayed as row in the Content List view will have this property (also named attribute in ICN) already fetched. There are use cases for this, two of them being:

• Using a custom attribute in the isVisible or isEnable function of an action, to decide if the action should be displayed based on business logic. I wrote about this here
• Using a custom property to display a new icon along with the lock/compound/readon-only/… icons. I wrote about this here

After spending some time investigating how ICN works to know what custom properties to fetch when retrieving the content of a folder (openFolder action), I came to the conclusion it goes through two steps:
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This tutorial will explain how to write a dialog allowing users to choose a file in a repository with a pretty tree selector. We will also add a feature to filter files based on extension. The tree will only show documents ending with a valid filter.

This is the final result:

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