How to add custom top level menus in Spotfire®

Introduction

With TIBCO Spotfire® 10.10, you can now use the C# API to add new top-level menus for your custom application and document tools. A custom top-level menu can also contain sub-menus for a more fine-grained arrangement.

This is especially useful when using Spotfire as a platform to build analytic applications. Since custom tools are often the most used tools for users of an analytic application, having direct access to them in a top-level menu makes the analytic application easier to use. In addition to the existing custom toolbar, co-branding, and white-labeling capabilities, the top-level menus feature provides an extra option for customizing Spotfire.

Read more about custom tools here.

User Experience

Custom top-level menus will appear to the right of the Tools menu.

Below is an example of a custom-level menu with one submenu:

Usage

The API for the MenuCategory class has been extended with a function, CreateCustom, that will take an array of strings as the path parameter:

 [ApiVersion("10.10.0")]

 public static MenuCategory CreateCustom(params string[] path) 

A function call could look like:

MenuCategory.CreateCustom("First", "Second")

This example creates a top-level menu called "First", that contains a submenu called "Second".

As before, customers can create a tool by inheriting it from the CustomTool class. In their constructor they can then create the CustomCategory:

 public MyTool()  

 : base(menuText, requiredLicense, MenuCategory.CreateCustom("First", "Second")) 

In this example, the custom tool, "MyTool" will be placed in the submenu. 

If you add several menus, they will appear in the order they are registered.

To place a custom tool in the standard Tools menu, just skip the MenuCategory argument. As before, submenus to the standard Tools menu are defined in the AddIn.RegisterTools method.

The SDK contains two examples of custom tools that are placed in a custom top-level menu,  AutomationToolExampleTopLevelMenu and NavigateToPageToolTopLevelMenu.