Who's right?

Question

Hello,
I was having a look to some documentation.
In the official "Creative Suite Extension Builder" documentation, in the "Product-specific Guides > InDesign Guide" chapter, I found this:
Custom menus in InDesign
The menu items for extensions that you create with Adobe Creative Suite Extension Builder can only be shown in the menu Window > Extensions. If you want to start your extension from another menu, you can do so using an InDesign C++ plug-in. Your C++ menu plug-in must launch your Flash-based extension using the C++ PlugPlug API. To prevent your extension from being displayed in the Window > Extensions menu, remove the menu name from the extension manifest.
For information on how to create a custom menu placement plug-in and how the plug-in can talk to your extension see the InDesign CS5 SDK (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/indesign/sdk/). .
Once you have created both the C++ plug-in and Flash-based components of your extension, bundle them together for distribution as a hybrid extension. For details, see the Signing and Packaging Toolkit, which you can download from the Adobe Creative Suite SDK page, http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/.
But, inside the InDesign CS5 SDK, I found this on the "feature-development-with-scripting.pdf" (see page 23):
Overriding default menu placement
N O T E : Overriding the default menu position is supported by InDesign, but not yet by other Creative Suite applications.
By default, CSXS supports a single main menu item, which appears in the application’s Window > Extensions menu. Extension developers may prefer a different menu location. InDesign sup- ports a Menu element and Placement attribute in the manifest.xml that allows an extension to override the default menu position. For example:
<Menu Placement="'Main:&amp;Window',600.0,'KBSCE Window menu'">FlexUIStroke</Menu>
The Placement attribute needs to be created with care. See the FlexuUIStroke code for a more precise example (without a line break).
Strings must be enclosed in single quotes.
Commas (without white space) are used to separate fields.
Who's right?
Thank you,
Luca

Answer 1

Well, I have not tried either of those methods myself; but, they do work.
If all you want to do is place the menu in a custom location, using the InDesign specific menu placement tag is the easiest, best, and recommended solution.
In the latest SDK update we've included event support for InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. That opens yet one more door for you.
If your needs are significantly more complex, by that I mean -
You need fully custom menu structure (such as adding your own menu to the main, with a menu tree under that)
You need to turn menu items on or off based on application/document state
You need to create and manage context menus
Here's how you would go about it:
            mainMenu = InDesign.app.menus.item( "$ID/Main" ).submenus.add( "My Menu" );
            var handler1Action: ScriptMenuAction = InDesign.app.scriptMenuActions.add( "The First Menu" );
            IDScriptingEventAdapter.getInstance().addEventListenerToObject( "onInvoke", myEventHandler, handler1Action )
            var handler1MenuItem: MenuItem = mainMenu.menuItems.add( handler1Action, LocationOptions.AT_END );
        public function myEventHandler( evt: Event = null ): void
            trace( "Menu Event fired" );
To do context menus, I would suggest looking at Ole's extendscript examples and simply extrapolating that technique to ActionScript and using the IDScriptingEventAdapter for event support.
Regards
Bob