Custom user actions are commands that are available for user access at different locations within SharePoint. These custom actions can come up in any location within SharePoint, like ribbon view, site settings page, ECB menu etc. It can be an icon/text that implements a functionality, such as navigating to a landing page, starting of a workflow on an item, and so on . All the icons that come up in the List View ribbon are examples of custom actions.In many scenarios, we might want to add custom business functionality as a custom user action for ease of access. In this article, we will see how to add a custom user action to the Site Actions Gear menu. The site actions menu houses the default custom action, like Add an app, Site contents, Design Manager etc.

SharePoint 2016 Site Actions
Image: SharePoint 2016 Site Actions

In addition to these, we will add a new custom user action in the Site Actions menu. It will act as a redirection shortcut to Advanced Search Settings page.

Internal Implementation

Let’s see how we can do the same programmatically using JavaScript object model,

Line number 2 specified the SharePoint location where the custom action should come up. Here, it is the Site Actions menu. The line number 6 assigns the URL for the custom action. It redirects itself to the enhanced search page. Thus, we are creating a shortcut for advanced search page in the Site Settings menu.

Full Code

The full code to add custom action to the Site Actions menu is, as shown below:

  1. <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
  2. <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
  3. $(document).ready(function() {
  4. SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', AddCustomUserAction);
  5. });
  7. function AddCustomUserAction() {
  8. //Get the client context and web object
  9. var clientContext = new SP.ClientContext();
  10. var oWeb = clientContext.get_web();
  11. //Get the custom user action collection and add the new custom action to it
  12. var collUserCustomAction = oWeb.get_userCustomActions();
  13. var oUserCustomAction = collUserCustomAction.add();
  14. //Specify the location and properties for the new custom action
  15. oUserCustomAction.set_location('Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu');
  16. oUserCustomAction.set_sequence(101);
  17. oUserCustomAction.set_group('SiteActions');
  18. oUserCustomAction.set_title("Search Settings");
  19. oUserCustomAction.set_url("/sites/Playground/_layouts/15/enhancedSearch.aspx?level=sitecol");
  20. oUserCustomAction.update();
  21. //Load the client context and execute the batch
  22. clientContext.load(collUserCustomAction);
  23. clientContext.executeQueryAsync(QuerySuccess, QueryFailure);
  24. }
  26. function QuerySuccess() {
  27. console.log("New Custom User Action has been added to site settings");
  28. }
  30. function QueryFailure() {
  31. console.log(args.get_message());
  32. }
  33. </script>
Let’s see how we can implement it in SharePoint. Save the above scripts onto a text file and upload it to the Site Assets library.

SharePoint Implementation

Thus, the new custom action has come up in the Site Actions menu.

Office365 Site Actions
Image: Office 365 Site Actions

On clicking it, it navigates to the Site Collection Administration Search Settings Page.

Site Collection Administration Search Setting

Summary

We have seen how to add the Advanced Search Settings page shortcut to the Site Actions gear menu as a custom user action, using JavaScript object model. This has been tried and tested in both SharePoint 2016 and Office 365.