The second blog post in this series was pretty long. This time I keep it way shorter. This time I focus more on the user experience and the ideas behind the final web part that consumes the third party API. Like I promised the web part code itself contains only a single REST query against my Azure Function and that’s it.
Let’s first take at the typical behaviour of the first party video web part available on Office 365.
In my first blog post of this series, I discussed how many intelligence you need in your web part when it comes to third-party API. Sometimes it makes more sense to remove the business logic out of the web part and use web parts just as the presentation layer. In the previous post, I also mentioned that might Azure Functions can be beneficial.
The Azure Portal is capable of implementing any Azure Function directly on their user interface, but there is also another option. It is possible to write Azure Functions nowadays locally and deploy them later to the cloud. This approach is in most cases more convenient, less error-prone and more comfortable to debug directly from Visual Studio Code for example.
When you write a new web part with the SharePoint Framework you might create a genius web part, where are the business logic is compiled into your web part. This approach makes sense when the web part is an isolated piece of work.
Sometimes you like to write pretty simple web parts that only access a backend or third-party API from somewhere on the Interweb. In this case, you can write all the data access inside your web part. Give the user the option to store APP Key, APP Secret and particular access token directly in the web part. Might pre-populate some of those properties of with your company-wide secrets and API keys too.
In case you recently upgrade NPM to Version 6.0 and created a new SharePoint Project through the Yeoman generator. There is a chance that you recognised the following new notification at the end of the NPM installation process.
Security Report after SPFx installation
What there are five vulnerabilities, one with severity low and four with severity high and I can run ‘npm audit’ to get a detailed report?
Don’t start to scream “fire” and run in panic through your office, uninstall all your SPFx projects from all your tenants, clean up your CDN, keep calm and learn the reason why this gets now reported after the installation.
No matter what your preferred operating system or device is, you can develop and deploy for SharePoint whatever you want to use. Even for the deploy modern experience components for branding such as themes for the modern experience.
In my case, I work mostly on Mac occasionally on Windows, whatever serves its purpose best. Sometimes I write PowerShell Scripts to configure things on Office 365, but there is a new option other than PowerShell, but those configuration changes nowadays are even possible through classic bash scripts through the opportunities provided by the Office 365 CLI.
Enough said on the new possibility let’s look why it might make sense to have multiple different themes available.
Recently I added a new sample to the PNP SharePoint Framework examples. The goal of this sample was to take text field input evaluate it against the Microsoft Graph and get information back information about a site collection, websites and list or libraries.
This blog post is no in-depth article on how to query the Microsoft Graph or how to make the code to work and authentication works. Instead, I like to give you an overview of the ideas behind the implementations.
You might have recognised that the workbench of the SharePoint Framework has a responsive design tester included. In this blog post, I take a look what possibilities we have to properly test the responsiveness and the user experience of a web part.
There are also some pitfalls included if you entirely rely on the integrated too.
Once a wise man cited a wiser woman with the following statement:
“My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. – Forest Gump”.
This quote can be applied to SharePoint in Office 365 nowadays too. When you have a provisioned classic site or even a modern site, then you never know what primary colour you get as your default theme.
Recently I stumbled in a new challenge I haven’t had for a long time. One of my customers wants to migrate users from Active Directory Domain A to Active Directory Domain B. The problem was that all the previously edited documents should get mapped to the new users.
