Adding Cascading Folder Content to your context menus

Steve · February 15, 2008, 6:08am

Adding Cascading Folder Content to your context menus

Opus allows detailed configuration of filetypes on your PC and provides some Opus specific filetypes to allow further customization. In this tutorial we will edit the context menu for the All Folders filetype which can be found by selecting Settings/Filetypes from the default lister menus.

Once you locate the All Folders filetype double-click it to open the "Edit 'All folders' File Type" dialog. Once it opens, select the Context Menu tab.

From this dialog we can add items to the context menu for all folders and even fine tune them to nest within sub-menus. In this example we will add a cascading folder content menu item to a sub-menu so that right clicking on the folder will give us a context menu sub item which shows all files/folders within the selected folder. Clear as mud eh?

Click the New... button at the bottom left of the dialog and you should be presented with the following dialog.

Name the Action anything you like - I will use "Contents" for this tutorial. Click the Type dropdown and choose Sub-menu. Note that sub-menus will only work in Opus and not in Windows Explorer.

Ok, that's created our sub-menu. We now need to populate this sub-menu with the opus function which displays the contents of the selected folder.

Again, select New... from the bottom of the dialog. This time, though, select Run an Opus function instead of the Sub-menu option. You can name this action anything you like, it doesn't matter as it's never displayed in the real context menu. Once you have selected Run an Opus function the dialog will redraw to show the following.

Type into the bottom of this dialog the following Opus command:

Go FOLDERCONTENT

Once, you've ok'd these dialogs you should end up back at the "Edit 'All folders' File Type" dialog which will now look similar to this (you may find the other items in the context menu list differ between systems (it depends on things installed on your pc). It's just the last two items which we created that are of interest.

Exit from all dialogs and open a Lister - you should now be able to right click on a folder and find your new command...

Note: If you create more items on the context menu, don't forget to right click any new ones and use the Decrease indent option. Otherwise, anything you add will end up in the sub-menu we created earlier.

W0lfdale · February 15, 2008, 7:29am

Very nice one using this i can browse the whole hierarchy of a folder, up using the breadcrumbs bar, down using folder contents.
The only thing i'm missing is the ability to double-click a folder to open it, and if i add the button option, i lose the intuitive and quick way of navigating cascading menus by hovering the mose over them and i have to click the right arrows!!! arrrrggggghhhhhh GPSoft has to reconsider the desin of this command.

BTW, is there a way to show folder icons beside folder names?

Leo · February 15, 2008, 10:48am

If you assign an icon (doesn't matter which one) to the Go FOLDERCONTENTS menu item then the menu it generates will have icons.

W0lfdale · February 15, 2008, 11:53am

vey nice tip nudel , thx.

xbprm · February 15, 2008, 12:03pm

Nice function, but if use right-click wihtin the tree I get the contents as addition (see screenshot). Any hint to avoid that?

Steve · February 15, 2008, 12:09pm

Don't right click in the tree?

W0lfdale · February 15, 2008, 12:19pm

is there a way to make this work on a drive's root and folder tab context menu?

goiano · February 15, 2008, 2:43pm

CONGRATULATIONS! Is very usefull. Very good this tutorial. Thanks.

xbprm · February 15, 2008, 3:24pm

Don't right click in the tree?[/quote]

A little bit more useful advices will be very much appreciated

Is it simple not possible and a feature request should be sent or can it be avoided by already existing means of Opus?

BeeTeeEss · February 16, 2008, 1:26am

Neat!

Thanks Steve.

Ben_Hill · February 17, 2008, 5:27pm

-Following up with xbprm's post.

Does Opus treat the Folder appearing in the tree as a different entity than the regular Folder in the display? I, too, was confused when the context command showed up when I right-clicked the folder in the tree, but it didn't work there. I still use the tree in certain layouts, and I would expect the behavior to be consistent the display. I think of them as the same. Are there differences between tree and display that I'm not aware of?

Leo · February 17, 2008, 8:46pm

It's just something that was overlooked, I expect. If any of you want it fixed, tell GPSoftware.

Jon · February 21, 2008, 5:38am

It's an oversight (ie: bug ) and turned out to be relatively trivial to fix - it will work in the next version.

xbprm · February 21, 2008, 8:44am

Thanks jon.

rcoleman1943 · February 22, 2008, 1:41am

I'm not being able to make this work.

I'm going to make a number of posts one after another each illustrating what happens at various points in the sequence because I don't seem to be able to attach all the screen shots in one post. Limit on number of attachments per post?

This post shows my context menu before attempting any of what is shown here. Not in particular the three items "File Finder ....", "Scan with Ad-Aware 2007", and "Ziphumter scan".

rcoleman1943 · February 22, 2008, 1:43am

After attempting the steps given above and just before closing the dialogs, I see the following which looks OK to me:

rcoleman1943 · February 22, 2008, 1:47am

But that results in the following context menu. Note that the items "Dile Finder ....". Scan with Ad-Aware 2007" and "Ziphunter scan" seem to have moved into the submenu of Contents.

rcoleman1943 · February 22, 2008, 1:51am

Looking now back in the edit dialog, I see the following which seems to correspond to what I see in the context menu, but why did the items get rearranged?

rcoleman1943 · February 22, 2008, 1:54am

I then right-clicked "File Finder" and selected "Decrease Indent" which caused the dialog to become the following. Looks OK.

rcoleman1943 · February 22, 2008, 2:00am

But the context menu becomes: