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.
When you write a new web part with the SharePoint Framework you might create a genius web part, where all 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 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.