Using your own Context Menu

The default context menu contains the buttons for Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Select All for all around the editor. Also it shows up Table Properties Editor, Table Cell Properties Editor and Hyperlink Editor if the Active Html Element is a table, table's cell or hyperlink respectively.

If you like to replace this default context menu and want to use your own context menu, you can easily do that by following steps:

1. Create your own ContextMenuStrip and name it as "contextMenuStrip1"
   
   
   
   
2. Set the EditorContextMenuStrip to this ContextMenuStrip
   
   
   

Whenever you add your own Context Menu Strip, the default context menu wont be shown. You wont have to take any effort to hide the default context menu in this case. But if you dont use your own context menu and if you dont want to show the default context menu either, then, you can set the property ShowDefaultContextMenu to false.

Now, if you want to get all the default command buttons in your new customized Context menu, then you may use the following table of reference which shows what are the public methods associated with each commands in the default ContextMenu.

	Context Menu Item	Associated public Methods Usage: htmlEditor1.Operations.MethodName()
	Cut	public void Cut()
	Copy	public void Copy()
	Paste	public void Paste()
	Delete	public void Delete()
	Select All	public void SelectAll()
	Table Properties	public void ShowTableDialog()
	Cell Properties	public void ShowTableCellEditor()
	Link Properties	public void ShowHyperLinkDialog()
	Image	public void ShowImageDialog()

In addition to the above reference, you may want to set visibility of certain buttons based on the selection status of the editor. For example, if the ActiveHtmlElement is not a Table Element then you may not need to keep "Table Properties" item visible in your Context Menu. In order to program the visibility of a button in Context Menu, you can take help of the SelectionState property of the editor.

For example, the following snippet will check if the active element is Table or Table Cell so that the appropriate button is set visible.

Additionally, you may want to Disable or Enable the Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete menu items based on the selection in the editor's content. For example, if there is no text selected in the editor, it is more practical to disable the Cut, Copy, Delete menu item. The SelectionState property will help you to do that. The following list shows the usage of some of the sub properties of SelectionState property.

• htmlEditor1.SelectionState.CanCut
• htmlEditor1.SelectionState.CanCopy
• htmlEditor1.SelectionState.CanDelete
• htmlEditor1.SelectionState.CanPaste
• htmlEditor1.SelectionState.CanRedo
• htmlEditor1.SelectionState.CanUndo

Moreover if you want to handle the commands by yourself and build your own mechanism instead of using the built-in properties you have the following public method available under the SelectionState property.

public bool QueryCommandEnabled(string commandName)

This method Returns a Boolean value that indicates whether a specified command can be successfully executed using execCommand, given the current state of the document. 

So, in order to decide if copy, paste etc, menu items should be enabled or disabled, you can use the following snippet:

Although, you dont need to add these lines of code in your program as the factory toolstrip items are already sensible to these states.