Adding a CMS action

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1 September 2009 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, Forms, Decorators | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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If like me you cannot figure out how on earth to use the updateCMSActions() function in a decorator and you also can't get the getCMSActions() function to find your custom method inside the controller then here is a way to make it work, which will allow you to create custom actions and buttons to trigger those actions within the CMS.

So let's jump strait in, first thing we need to do is add the form action to our page using the getCMSActions() function. So inside your page model we add this:

	function getCMSActions(){
		
		$actions = parent::getCMSActions();
		
		$Action = new FormAction(
			   "doAction",
			   "Do something different"
			);
		$actions->push($Action);
		
		return $actions;
	} 

 

Decorating CMSMain

Now we have our button you might have though adding the doAction() function would be a simple case of sticking it into our controller. Unfortunately not, this will give you an error because when viewing a page in the CMS the edit form does not have access to the functions in our controller. So instead we are going to add our function to the same place as the other CMS actions:  inside CMSMain. However to avoid having to edit the core files we will use the LeftAndMainDecorator to do this. This works in exactly the same way as the DataObjectDecorator but, you guessed it, decorates LeftAndMain, which is the code class that controlls much of the CMS interface.

So create a new file inside mysite/code called CMSActionDecorator.php and put this code in it:

<?php
class CMSActionDecorator extends LeftAndMainDecorator {
	
	function doAction(){
		FormResponse::status_message(sprintf('All good!'),'good');
		return FormResponse::respond();
	}	
}

 

So all our doAction() function is going to do when run is show a green 'All good!' message at the bottom of the page. You can however put anything you like in here.

Something a little more useful

At this point you may be wondering how much use this is without having the currently selected pages ID. Well by adding $id = (int)$_REQUEST['ID'];  to the top of this function we can then use DataObject::get_by_id() or similar to get the current page and work on it. For example say I wanted to create a button that deleted all the DataObjects attached to the current page I could change my doAction() function to something like this:

	function doAction(){
		
		$id = (int)$_REQUEST['ID'];	
		
		$DataObjects = DataObject::get('SomeObject', 'PageID=' . $id);
		
		foreach($DataObjects as $DataObject){
			$DataObject->Delete();
		}
		
		FormResponse::status_message(sprintf('Deleted all objects' ),'good');
		return FormResponse::respond();
	}	

 

Config settings

Finally we need to tell SilverStripe that we have extended CMSMain by adding this line to our mysite/_config.php:

Object::add_extension('CMSMain', 'CMSActionDecorator');

 

And there you have it, the slightly hacky but still usable way to add form actions to your CMS pages.