Adding Menu Items to the Markdown Monster Menu

You can also add new menu items to the existing Markdown Monster main menu by using the AddMenuItem() method on the Addin class.

To do this:

• Add an OnWindowLoaded() overload
• Create a Menu Item with Header and Click handler
• Call Addin.AddMenuItem()

AddMenuItem() allows adding a WPF menu item before or after an existing menu item, either by menu item Name or the header text in the Header property. Important: The name or header have to match exactly in order for the existing menu item to be found. You can look up the menu items in the source code - look for the Name="MainMenu" and look through the items there.

If the source menu item is not found the new menu item is not inserted and fails silently. The error is logged, but there's no visual clue that it failed in the UI.

By default new menu items are added after the matched element, but you can override and insert before or replace a menu item using the addMode enum parameter.

The following addin adds two menu items to Markdown Monster's File menu:

public override Task OnWindowLoaded()
{
    // create and add custom menu item
    var mitemOpen = new MenuItem()
    {
        Header = "Open from Gist",
        Name = "ButtonOpenFromGist"
    };
    mitemOpen.Click += (s, a) => OnExecuteLoadGist();
    if (!AddMenuItem(mitemOpen, menuItemNameForInsertionAfter: "ButtonOpenFromHtml"))
        mmApp.Log("Unable to add custom menu item in Paste Code As Gist Addin: " + mitemOpen.Name);

    var mitemSave = new MenuItem()
    {
        Header = "Save to Gist",
        Name = "ButtonSaveToGist"
    };
    mitemSave.Click += (s, a) => OnExecuteSaveGist();
    if (!AddMenuItem(mitemSave, menuItemNameForInsertionAfter: "ButtonGeneratePdf"))
        mmApp.Log("Unable to add custom menu item in Paste Code As Gist Addin: " + mitemSave.Name);
        
    return Task.CompletedTask;
}

Use OnWindowLoad()

Note that this code has to run in OnWindowLoaded() because it requires access to the Window and dispatcher and that the window and controls are already loaded. OnWindowInitialized() fires too early for direct UI interactions.

AddMenuItem()

The AddMenuItem function lets you add a menu item before or after an existing menu item. To use it you provide a menu item, and either a menu item name or header caption. You can also specify whether the new menu item is added before or after the first match.

The signature is:

public bool AddMenuItem(
  MenuItem mitem,
  string menuItemNameForInsertionAfter = null,
  string menuItemTextForInsertionAfter = null,
  AddMenuItemModes addMode = AddMenuItemModes.AddAfter)

Finding Menu Item Names

You can check for Menu Item names for use in menuItemNameForInsertionAfter in the Markdown Monster MainWindow.xaml source code. Note that not all menu items have names, so for those that don't use can use the menu item's Header property or content value instead with menuItemTextForInsertionAfter.