Like I promised yesterday. You can even run a specific SPFx generator version with a specific NodeJS version through the help of NPM.
While it might not is a practical approach it can help you sometimes when you like to run for example an older version of the project to test some behaviour before you fix the issues.
Have you ever wanted to run an older version of the SPFx generator? Maybe on an existing project to add some new assets? It is possible without any installation of the generator at all. Recently a tool was released inside your NPM installation that is named ‘NPX‘.
In short, NPX is a tool that allows you to run npm binaries and packages without having them installed locally. This tool got first released in NPM 5.2.0.
It’s been a while since Rob Wormald from Google introduced the first web part using Angular Elements. Last week a new version 1.4.0 of the PnP SPFx Yeoman generator was released.
Whenever you save a TypeScript file in your SPFx project, the build chain creates a new build and refreshes the local workbench automatically.
There are some situations you like to have this support for other asset or frameworks too. In most cases with the PnP/SPFx generator, we need to force a build when a Handlebar or VueJS file get saved.
So the goal is to hijack the build process and add some custom file watch based on the requirement of the framework or file. Why file? Imagine you have an SVG file in your solution. The expected outcome is that you see the changes immediately in your browser.
The key word to this is watch. It requires a custom file extension watch that than trigger the build.
Right before the launch of the first version of PnP/SPFx I had a longer chat with a friend of mine Thomas Goelles, and he pointed out that it is great to be able to re-run the generator to add more web parts using a specific version of a framework. There was one fact that we haven’t thought about or maybe overlooked. What happens when the current project setup does not support the required version yet?
The previous version had merely a blocking mechanism implemented that checked if the current project was created using version 1.6.
Sometimes there is the requirement to move files from your source code directory to the lib folder. These files can be images, JSON files or any imaginable asset that is not recognised by the build chain of SPFx.
There are two ways to achieve this one. One used gulp the other gets accomplished through the configuration of a copy-static-assets.json. Let me explain these to methods what scenarios suites best in which case.
I firmly believe that the Yeoman generator provided by Microsoft is a great tool. It serves all the capabilities to create new web parts, extensions and customisations in the future. With the current support of ReactJS, Knockout and bare-bone HTML version, you have three great possibilities.
This PnP/SPFx generator project goes beyond these possibilities and supports enhanced functionalities. A way to add additional capabilities in the future not even for new frameworks and libraries on the market. It also helps organisations to defined their development standards.
Time is running fast. It is more than a week ago since the first release of the Pattern and Practices open source community generator was released. After one week we already have a new release ready for you that makes it even easier for you to get started your development.
Here are five things that make your life easier.
I am pretty excited that finally the first version of the open source community driven SPFx generator has been released last Thursday and publicly announced and is part of the SharePoint / Office 365 Pattern and Practices Personally, for me, it was a great journey to bring this to life in collaboration with Microsoft engineering.
It was a longer journey than expected but there were some considerations and decisions to make to have a solid fundament for future improvements and to allow fast and easy integrations.