What is a DXCore Action?

An action is one of the components you can drop on your plug-in design surface.

When you do so it looks like this ....

It can be triggered via either a mouse or keyboard shortcut (found in the IDE shortcuts page of the options screen) or placed on a menu (for example the context menu of the Code Editor)

It is a derivative of ‘system.component’ adding a few properties…

 

…and events…

Some of these are worth drawing special attention to.

Properties
ActionName: The name of the action as displayed to UI like the commands dropdown in the IDE\Shortcuts options page.
ButtonText: What text would you like to represent this action when it is placed on a menu?
CommonMenu: A list of some of the more common menus found around VS.
ParentMenu: An alternative to CommonMenu. Use the name of any menu you know of, to place the action on that rather than one of the ‘common’ ones.

Note: The placing of Actions on menus is entirely optional and CommonMenu and ParentMenu are mutually exclusive options.

Events
Execute: The main event (so to speak :)). Fired whenever the assigned shortcut is triggered or the representative menu item is chosen. This is how the Action does it’s stuff.

In my next post I will walk you through your first actual plugin … Yes we will be starting slow, but we’ll ramp up fairly quickly as the posts flow… so you’ll be knocking out your own custom refactorings and the like pretty soon.