Extensions Made Easy: UseSmallImage and custom ordering.

Hey guys,

I’m terribly tired, but before hitting my bed I wanted to let you know that EME 1.11.3 is ready, tested, checked in, tested again and published.

The most notable change is that I refactored the EasyCommandExporter a wee bit.  It only contains one constructor from now on (I introduced a second a while ago for some Dispatcher finetuning), which contains some  mandatory and some optional parameters:

public EasyCommandExporter(
  string displayName,
  string description,
  string groupName,
  Uri imageUri,
  Dispatcher dispatcher = Dispatcher.PreferCurrentActiveScreen, //Refactored: overloaded ctor -> optional parameter
  bool useSmallImage = false, //New optional parameter
  string prefixUsedForSortingWithinGroup = "" //New optional parameter
)

UseSmallImage

Set it to true to use a “small” image for your command.  Thanks, Kivito, for teaching me about this (I completely missed it).  You can vertically stack 3 “small” commands in your ribbon for each “normal” command.

PrefixUsedForSortingWithinGroup

By default, the EME framework sorted your EasyCommands by DisplayName to accomplish consistent ordering.

As falkao indicated, a developer might want to take control of the order in which the commands should be shown.  I played around with it a bit and found that:

• ordering the commands yourself is especially useful when mixing “small” and “normal” commands, so you can choose the “small” commands to stack…
• a “prefix” string is easier to maintain than a “priority” integer, especially when adding new commands to the middle of your group…

Ergo, vis-a-vis, the EME framework now sorts your EasyCommands by “{PrefixUsedForSortingWithinGroup} – {DisplayName}”.

 

Time to turn my LightSwitch out for tonight. 🙂