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I know that neither list view or icon view is used too much, but the original plan for both of these views was to display a special popup menu when invoked on white space containing no list/icon element. The menu should be obtained via getExplorerContext().getContextActions() As we are heading to finish issue 27868 we should decide whether we want this behaviour or not as it also influence the Looks API. My opinion is that we want it, so I have created the patch to show the impl.
Created attachment 8455 [details] Diff against action_27868 branch
IMHO context actions are not really necessary in the API and just add complexity; we have never used them and possibly never will. (You could just ask for regular actions of the explored context and get a tolerable UI.) However, it is historically in the API and documented, and we should support if it is there and we can support it.
thanks, patch applied in o.o.e.view.ListView, rev. 1.73.
It's there and it rocks!