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Creating Custom Elements

In general, creating a Custom Element is a seven-step process:

  1. Define the Name, Description, Category, and Element type. Create a New Custom Element by selecting Add New Element from the Manage Elementsdialog. Complete fields in the New Custom Element dialog. To enable styling by Element ID, CommonSpot creates an anchor tag with a name attribute and assigns an ID attribute to the Element itself when you name an Element via the Element Name menu option.
  2. Define Data Fields for the Element. This process is similar to defining fields for Simple Forms or Metadata forms.
  3. Define Security permissions for the Element. Once you finish creating fields for the new Element, you can assign Element-level security (this is similar to setting Field Level Security) to define rights to the entire Element.
  4. Define Data Browser Properties. Select the Data Browser Properties option from the Custom Element edit menu to configure parameters for how Element data displays in the data browser portion of the Select Rendering Mode dialog.
  5. Optionally Define Index Properties. For Global Custom Elements only, you must configure the Viewing Page & Search Properties to include Element content in full-text indexes.
  6. Optionally Define/Select any Field Rendering Masks for Data Fields. For Custom Element fields added to Display Templates, CommonSpot provides a Field Render Mask feature for programmatically controlling field value display.
  7. Define Layout options for the Element. Create one or more Display Templates, or code one or more Render Handlers to control Element data display.

 

Related Links

New Custom Element

Custom Element Image Options

You can download PDF versions of the Content Contributor's, Administrator's, and Elements Reference documents from the support section of paperthin.com (requires login).

The following guides are available from the support site and are in the /docs/directory of your CommonSpot Server:
You can also download these other guides from the support section of paperthin.com (with login):

For technical support:

http://www.paperthin.com/support/