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.
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.
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.
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.
The most straightforward example to make you familiar with how to create a custom SPFx Yeoman generator is to use Yarn instead of NPM as your default package manager. The approach to change the default package manager is simple, and many people already use it as there default package managing solution.
So, instead of adding the ‘–skip-install’ option whenever you start a new project just add this option to a generator.
The first step is, as always, to create a new NPM package.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to speak at SharePoint Saturday Helsinki organised by Jussi Roine and Jussi Mori. With more than 170 attendees and 20 speakers, it was the best place to be in Helsinki on this Saturday.
While I was checking my demos for my session, I recognised a problem that currently exists on the Online Workbench for SPFx. The demo based on my blog post on how to make your web parts responsive to the parent container. In this blog post, I make use of the Office UI Fabric grid system class names and colour the content of the web part differently according to the parent container. A method beneficial to support the responsive flow of web parts and to improve the user experience.
The new SharePoint Framework has a smart way to avoid conflicting CSS definitions. Therefore all style sheet classes will be post-fixed with a unique random string and converted to a JSON object. In your web part code, you can use the same class name as you used in your style sheets and the variable will be automatically replaced with the random class name string. So far the good parts of the SharePoint Framework.
In practice, this has some limitations and challenges.