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.