Monday 12 November 2018

Attach additional event listener to out of the box SharePoint ribbon control

Have you ever had a use case where you must do something additional when an out of the box ribbon control is clicked, like "Open With Explorer" or "Export to Excel"? Maybe not, until now?
What could make this use case valid is the fact that the ribbon is slowly being phased out and it is no longer available in the modern experience, in addition not all features available in the ribbon are supported by all browsers and clients.
Having something additional being executed when a button from the ribbon is clicked can help you collect usage data for this features and better plan the move to modern experience or (like it or not) making Edge default browser, which does not support "Open with Explorer".
I am not aware of any other way to collect this information in SharePoint on-prem or Online.
Here is an example script that can be added as Scriptlink user custom action and it will attach additional click event listener on the "Open With Explorer" button. Everything that the function will do is to log the action, user name and the document library title in the console, but you can do whatever you find for useful, like logging it in the ULS or calling an API that will record the event.
I have tested it in SharePoint 2016 but it should work in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online classic experience lists, it requires JQuery.



The Script: