Extending Ucommerce Admin

When working with the different entities in Ucommerce admin, you have the option to add additional tabs to each view, so that you can integrate your own user controls in Ucommerce admin.

Configuring Tabs

To add more tabs to a view, you need to go to the database, and add your tab to the ucommerce_admintab table. To find out which view (page) the tab is related to, take a look at the ucommerce_adminpage table.

The following table contains the columns in ucommerce_admintab which should be of interest to you:

Column	Description
VirtualPath	The virtual path of your user control (.ascx). The path is relative to the page you want the tab to appear on. Note that you can use both ~/ and ../.
AdminPageId	The page where the tab should be placed on, defined in ucommerce_adminpage.
SortOrder	Defines how the tabs for the page should be ordered.
Multilingual	If set to true, one tab of the type is added per language configured in Umbraco. Note: Multilinual tabs should implement the IMultilingual interface – more about this later.
ResourceKey	Put the text on your tab here. This will be overriden by the language name if you specify your tab to be multilingual.
HasSaveButton	If set to true, the save button will be visible on the toolbar for this tab.
HasDeleteButton	The same as HasSaveButton, only for a delete button.
Enabled	Yes, you can both enable and disable tabs.

Implementing User Controls For Use On Tabs

To create the user control you want on your new tab, simply create a new project in Visual Studio, create a reference to UCommerce.Presentation.dll, create a new user control, and make that user control inherit from UCommerce.Presentation.Web.ViewEnabledControl. The generic parameter T must be the type of the view you
your control to appear on. This is necessary so that they can interact.

You’ll find a list of the most commonly used view here:

View	Interface
Edit product catalog group	IEditProductCatalogGroupView
Edit product catalog	IEditProductCatalogView
Edit category	IEditCategory
Edit product	IEditProduct
View order	IViewOrderGroupView

There are one for each view in Ucommerce, and should be pretty easy to find. Let me know if there is one you can’t find.

From your user control, there are two events that is of interest to subscribe to:

    
    event EventHandler<EntityCommandEventArgs<T>> Saving;
    event EventHandler<EntityCommandEventArgs<T>> Saved;

The Saving event is raised before the main entity (e.g. Product on IEditProductView) is saved, and the Saved event is raised after the main entity has been saved. If you want to modify the main entity before it is saved, do it at the Saving event. The EntityCommandEventArgs will pass you a reference to the main entity.

For some views, you can also subscribe to these two events, which are raised when deleting the entity – they are handy for doing some cleanup:

    
    event EventHandler<EntityCommandEventArgs<T>> Deleting;
    event EventHandler<EntityCommandEventArgs<T>> Deleted;

From your user control, you also have access to the view itself using the View-property on the ViewEnabledControl you inherit from.

Creating Mutlilingual Tabs

As previously mentioned, you can make your tabs multilingual by implementing the IMultilingual interface. By doing this, one tab containing your user contorl will appear for each language configured in Umbraco. The CultureCode property will automatically be set to the culture code of the language for the tab.

    
    /// <summary>
    /// Contains definition for a multi lingual class.
    /// </summary>
    public interface IMultiLingual
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The culture code.
        /// </summary>
        /// <example>
        /// da-DK for Denmark, en-GB for Great Britian etc.
        /// </example>
        string CultureCode { get; set; }
    }

Custom Initialization On Tabs

If you want custom initialization on your tab, you can implement the ISection interface.

    
    /// <summary>
    /// Defines a UI section.
    /// </summary>
    public interface ISection
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Returns <see cref="ICommand">commands</see> for this section.
        /// </summary>
        /// <remarks>
        /// This is where the menu should be initialized.
        /// </remarks>
        IList<ICommand> GetCommands();
    
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets a value indicating whether or not this section should be displayed.
        /// </summary>
        bool Show { get; }
    }

If, for example, you want to add your own custom button to the toolbar, you can do it like this:

    
    public void IList<ICommand> GetCommands()
    {
    	var commands = new List<ICommand>();
    
    	commands.Add(new ImageCommand(x => OnClickAction())
    		{
    			Icon = "images/ui/add.png",
    			Text = "My Button"
    		});
    
    	return commands;
    }

Summary

When you are done with your user control, copy the .ascx to the path you have specified in ucommerce_admintab, copy the dll to the /bin folder, and your new tab should be ready for use.