Nuxeo Studio is a great tool and by far the easiest way to configure the Nuxeo Platform. Here’s a small trick to make your life even easier. The platform comes with a lot of features and sometimes you may want to reuse some elements from the default configuration or plugins such as user actions, views, or vocabularies. The issue here is that Nuxeo Studio is not aware of those elements and so they don’t appear in selection lists. But there is a very simple and clean way to tell Studio to use other actions, views or vocabularies and that is what we will discuss in this blog.

Let’s say we have a vocabulary declared in a custom plugin and want to configure a selection widget to use it. As mentioned previously, Studio is not aware of that vocabulary and thus doesn’t let you select it.


Vocabulary Drop Down List in StudioVocabulary Drop Down List in Studio

That’s where custom properties come super handy and they let you set any vocabulary even if it’s not declared in Studio.


Custom Properties EditorCustom Properties Editor

This trick works for almost any widget property. For example, I usually configure a custom tab for the Domain object in which I reuse the My Task view from the default dashboard. It wouldn’t be fun at all if we had to configure the whole thing again. Fortunately, it’s an action and you can reuse it. The UI development mode lets you find the action ID easily, dashboard_user_tasks in this case.


Default DashboardDefault Dashboard

Custom Domain TabCustom Domain Tab

All we need to do here is add an action form widget in the tab and set the action ID using a custom property.


Action Form Widget EditorAction Form Widget Editor

One last trick, if you don’t know what the custom property name is, just set any value using the Studio dropdown list and have a look at the commit in the branch management menu. The property name will be highlighted in green as well as the value and some other information.


Nuxeo Studio Commit ViewerNuxeo Studio Commit Viewer