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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Design and create beautiful solutions using modern development tools for SharePoint Online
About This Book
- Get the best out of the latest Sharepoint Framework and leverage the Sharepoint RESTful and JSOM APIs.
- Develop efficient client side applications with JavaScript injection and Sharepoint Addins.
- Get the best tips and tricks on designing your website flawlessly.
Who This Book Is For
This book targets current SharePoint developers, as well as people starting their journey on SharePoint development. The reader must have basic web development programming knowledge, including JavaScript and CSS. The reader should have familiarity using and managing SharePoint-based collaboration sites.
What You Will Learn
- Understand what the SharePoint Framework is
- Create modern solutions using the new tools, approaches and frameworks
- Learn how to use Visual Studio Code for effective SharePoint development
- Package and deploy your code, using automation as needed
- Work with content and data stored in SharePoint
- Benefit from third party frameworks without having to build your own frameworks
- Debug and troubleshoot your code with ease
- Configure security in your application
In Detail
SharePoint is one of Microsoft's best known web platforms. A loyal audience of developers, IT Pros and power users use it to build line of business solutions.
The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a great new option for developing SharePoint solutions. Many developers are creating full-trust based solutions or add-in solutions, while also figuring out where and how SPFx fits in the big picture.
This book shows you how design, build, deploy and manage SPFx based solutions for SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2016.
The book starts by getting you familiar with the basic capabilities of SPFx. After that, we will walk through the tool-chain on how to best create production-ready solutions that can be easily deployed manually or fully automated throughout your target Office 365 tenants.
We describe how to configure and use Visual Studio Code, the de facto development environment for SPFx-based solutions. Next, we provide guidance and a solid approach to packaging and deploying your code.
We also present a straightforward approach to troubleshooting and debugging your code an environment where business applications run on the client side instead of the server side.
Style and approach
The approach will be that of a practical tutorial which will take you through every topic using code samples and working examples.
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Seitenzahl: 328
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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SharePoint Development with the SharePoint Framework
Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing
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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: September 2017
Production reference: 1260917
ISBN 978-1-78712-143-0
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Authors
Jussi Roine
Olli Jääskeläinen
Copy Editor
Safis Editing
Reviewer
Bill Ayers
Project Coordinator
Ritika Manoj
Commissioning Editor
Amarabhab Banerjee
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor
Siddharth Mandal
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Content Development Editor
Mohammed Yusuf Imaratwale
Graphics
Jason Monteiro
Technical Editor
Prashant Mishra
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
About the Authors
Jussi Roine started working with SharePoint with the very first version, SharePoint Portal Server 2001, in late 2000. With a strong infrastructure and development background by then, and also having worked quite a bit on Linux-based solutions, SharePoint fascinated him with its seemingly endless potential and easiness for end users. He continued working with SharePoint through all the versions since, including SharePoint Portal Server 2003, MOSS 2007, and SharePoint 2010, 2013, and 2016. He also enjoyed working with customers when they started moving beyond on-premises to the early cloud-based offerings on BPOS and Office 365, later in 2011. He has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional since 2014, and a Microsoft Certified Trainer since 2006. In 2012 and 2014, he had the honor of attending the Microsoft Certified Master (later Microsoft Certified Solutions Master) program, which he passed among the very selected few in the world at the time. In 2017, Jussi became a Microsoft Regional Director, a member of 150 of the world’s top technology visionaries chosen for their community leadership and cross-platform expertise. Having providing his clients with solutions, architectures, and trusted advisor services for 25 years now, he has also had a chance to dive deeply into Microsoft Azure, which connects and integrates with Office 365 robustly. Over the years, he has written several books on SharePoint, the Office clients, productivity, flexwork, and Microsoft platforms. This book is his first international book aimed at a more diverse audience, and he hopes that this book will help current and future developers working on the Office 365 platform to more easily provide superior solutions for their clients using SharePoint Framework.
Olli Jääskeläinen is a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). Olli has been working in the field for over 15 years. He knows SharePoint inside out and is currently focusing on building productivity solutions using Office 365. Olli works as an architect for Sulava and as an organizer for the Office 365 and SharePoint User Group Finland. He has been giving technical presentations since 2013 at events such as TechDays Finland, European SharePoint Conference, TechTalks Finland, SharePoint Saturdays, and Office 365 Engage.
About the Reviewer
Bill Ayers is a consultant developer and solution architect who has been working with SharePoint since the 2003 version of the product. He is a Microsoft Certified Master and Charter MCSM, and a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Office Development MVP. He specializes in Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Office 365, and mobile solutions, with a particular focus on agile software development practices. He has over 25 years of experience in the software industry and speaks regularly at international conferences and user groups. He is also a moderator on SharePoint.StackExchange.com, and blogs occasionally at http://SPDoctor.com/. He is based in Sheffield, UK.
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Table of Contents
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Downloading the example code
Errata
Piracy
Questions
Introducing SharePoint Online for Developers
What is SharePoint Online?
SharePoint sites and site collections
SharePoint document libraries
SharePoint lists
SharePoint web parts
Why SharePoint Online?
Office 365 licensing
Choosing an Office 365 license for development use
Getting started with SharePoint Online
Creating new site collections
A word or two on SharePoint site templates
Site definitions
Site templates
Web templates
SharePoint Online and site templates
Creating a new site collection
Developer sites versus team sites
SharePoint Online APIs
A quick primer on Microsoft Graph
Developing solutions for SharePoint Online
Solutions for SharePoint and SharePoint Online
SharePoint 2001-2003: direct modification of files
SharePoint 2007--Full-trust code
SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online: sandbox solutions
SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint Online: add-ins
SharePoint Online--add-ins and client-side scripts
Development tooling for SharePoint Online
Summary
Developing Solutions for SharePoint
Introducing the SharePoint Framework
SharePoint extensibility
Philosophy of the SharePoint Framework
Types of projects the SharePoint Framework supports
Key features of the SharePoint Framework
Toolchain
npm
Yeoman and Yeoman SharePoint generator
Gulp
Visual Studio Code
Browser developer tools
SharePoint Workbench
Introducing Office Developer Patterns and Practices
Office Developer Patterns and Practices in practice
Contributing to Office Dev PnP
Application life cycle management with SharePoint customizations
Managing and versioning source code and assets
GitHub
Visual Studio Team Services
Deploying, retracting, and managing solutions
Summary
Getting Started with the SharePoint Framework
Setting up your development environment
Step 1 - Installing Node.js
Step 2 - Node package manager
Step 3 - Installing Yeoman and Gulp
Step 4 - Installing the Yeoman SharePoint generator
Step 5 - Install Visual Studio Code
Testing your SharePoint Framework development environment
Step 1 - Creating a folder for the web part
Step 2 - Running the Yeoman SharePoint generator
Step 3 - Installing the developer certificate
Step 4 - Running the web part on a local workbench
Anatomy of the SharePoint Framework web part project
Main folders and root level configuration files
TypeScript basics in the SharePoint Framework
Key files of the SharePoint Framework web part projects
Summary
Building Your First Web Part
Creating a feedback list
Creating the feedback web part project
Setting web part basics
Building feedback web part user experience
Testing the user interface
Saving the feedback
Testing and troubleshooting the web part
Ideas for fine tuning the web part for production use
Using Office 365 to build better business process
Building smarter controls
Provisioning of the Feedback list and other resources
Localization
Localizing web part manifest
Localizing texts
Calendar and currency
Summary
Using Visual Studio Code and Other Editors
Introducing Visual Studio Code
Installing Visual Studio Code
Getting to know Visual Studio Code
Changing the color theme
Working with files
Extensions
Working with the SharePoint Framework in Visual Studio Code
Running commands with the Integrated Terminal
Using Visual Studio instead of Visual Studio Code
Summary
Packaging and Deploying Solutions
Overview of packaging and deploying
Packaging SharePoint Framework solutions
Using Gulp to package a project
Deploying SharePoint Framework solutions
App Catalog
Installing the app
Deploying assets
SharePoint Online CDN and Microsoft Azure CDN
Configuring a SharePoint Online CDN
Updating the project to support a SharePoint Online CDN
Deploying assets to a SharePoint Online CDN
Configuring Microsoft Azure Storage CDN
Updating the project to support Microsoft Azure CDN
Deploying assets to Microsoft Azure CDN
Summary
Working with SharePoint Content
Overview of working with SharePoint content
Using mock data
Using mock data with locally hosted SharePoint Workbench
Step 1 - create data model
Step 2 - create MockSharePointClient
Step 3 - consume the mock data in the web part
Accessing real data with SPHttpClient
Working with SharePoint lists
Requesting the list of lists with SPHttpClient
Checking if the list exists and creating lists
Working with SharePoint list items
Creating an Office 365 Group and new SharePoint list
Basic operation with SharePoint list items using SPHttpClient
Step 1 - create a hello-listitems web part project
Step 2 - add a data model for list items
Step 3 - build the user interface for the web part
Step 4 - define the function that will make SPHttpClient request to read list items and test the web part
Step 5 - implementing the _runOperation function and building a skeleton for CRUD operation functions
Step 6 - implementing the create operation
Step 7 - implementing the read operation
Step 8 - implementing the update operation
Step 9 - implementing the delete operation
Summary
Working with the Web Part Property Pane
Web part property pane
Property panes in classic web parts
Property panes in SharePoint Framework web parts
Implementing a property pane
Fields in property panes
Implementing headers, groups, and fields
Implementing multiple pages in property panes
Handling property field events
Implementing custom properties in a property pane
Defining a custom field type
Summary
Using React and Office UI Fabric React Components
Overview
Understanding React
React is declarative
React is component-based
Introduction to Fabric React components
Fabric React support
How to obtain Fabric React for your web part
Using Fabric React components
Button
Dialog
TextField
Using React and Office UI Fabric React components in SharePoint Framework web parts
Creating the SharePoint Framework React To-do web part
Step 1 - Creating a React web part project
Step 2 - Adding Office UI Fabric React to the project
Step 3 - Examining the React project structure
Step 4 - Creating the ITodoItem interface and mockup data
Step 5 - Implementing a to-do list in React and Fabric React components
Modifying the web part file
Modifying the ReactTodo component
Creating TodoItemComponent
Summary
Working with Other JavaScript Frameworks
Overview
Using jQuery in SharePoint framework web parts
Loading jQuery from CDN
Bundling jQuery to the web part package
Knockout
AngularJS and Angular
Using SharePoint patterns and practices JavaScript Core Library
Accessing user profiles
Sending email
Working with lists and list items
Working with JavaScript libraries
Additional considerations
Summary
Troubleshooting and Debugging SharePoint Framework Solutions
Troubleshooting
Ensuring an up-to-date npm
Updating the Yeoman template version
Troubleshooting the npm cache
Optimization
Optimizing the SharePoint Framework packages
Loading external packages
Debugging solutions
Debugger statements using browser developer tools
Debugging with source maps
Debugging in Visual Studio Code
Summary
SharePoint APIs and Microsoft Graph
SharePoint APIs
SharePoint REST APIs
Accessing SharePoint Online with CSOM using a console app
Accessing SharePoint Online with REST using a console app
Accessing REST APIs with SharePoint Framework
Microsoft Graph
What is Microsoft Graph?
Accessing Microsoft Graph with Graph Explorer
Accessing Microsoft Graph with SharePoint Framework
Summary
The Future of SharePoint Customizations
The future of SharePoint developers
Our recommendations for developers
The SharePoint Framework support in SharePoint 2016
Is SharePoint Framework the final framework for SharePoint developers?
Summary
Preface
SharePoint Framework is the new, modern, and fresh approach for implementing customizations in SharePoint and SharePoint Online. It’s a client-side approach to a server-side problem, allowing developers already familiar with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to implement lightweight custom functionality for SharePoint.
In the past, SharePoint-based development has been challenging, complex, poorly documented and full of changing directions from Microsoft.
Originally, in early 2000, the guidance, was not to modify or customize SharePoint. Microsoft was saying at the time not to touch anything and simply to use SharePoint as a portal service that hosts your content and documents. With newer versions of SharePoint for on-premises deployments, Microsoft initially introduced a somewhat home-brewed approach to implementing custom web parts (widgets on a page) and UI elements. This included legacy .bat files, weird file formats, numerous modifications to XML files with minimal documentation and a cryptic approach to provisioning your solutions between different environments.
Between then and now we’ve also had different models for developing solutions for SharePoint in the cloud; this included a better approach to implementing features without deploying server-side code, but by the time this was made available developers were already familiar with Microsoft .NET-based customizations on the server-side. Giving a replacement client-side model that had strict rules and security restrictions did not go down easily for seasoned SharePoint developers.
Finally, now with the SharePoint Framework, we have a documented framework for implementing UI elements, custom web parts, and features for SharePoint 2016 in on-premises and SharePoint Online in Office 365. It is still early days, but we’re already seeing good uptake from developers who can now finally and confidently migrate their existing code to the cloud while simultaneously switching from .NET-based development languages to TypeScript, which is a superset of JavaScript.
This book will take you from a Hello World-implementation in SharePoint Framework to implementing enterprise-ready functionality with ease. We’ll walk you through the essential knowledge you need in order to survive in a modern project that aims to use SharePoint Framework as the core development model. In addition, the necessary tools are explained, as well as debugging and troubleshooting. Obviously, you might still be using other JavaScript frameworks, such as jQuery, AngularJS, and React so we have guidance on that too – because SharePoint Framework does allow and support you to use other frameworks while implementing SharePoint functionality.
This book will provide an invaluable resource for all those seeking to use and learn the SharePoint Framework as their development model for SharePoint.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introducing SharePoint Online for Developers, will give you a short history lesson to understand the limitations of the previous development models for SharePoint. You will begin to see how and where SharePoint Framework differs the most and why it matters.
Chapter 2, Developing Solutions for SharePoint, will introduce you to SharePoint Framework in more detail. It covers the types of project you can implement and reveals how to code and start using the necessary tools quickly.
Chapter 3, Getting Started with SharePoint Framework, walks you through installing the toolchain and verifying everything is installed correctly. You’ll learn how project files are laid out and where to find what.
Chapter 4, Building Your First Web Part, you will code your own SharePoint Framework-based web part and deploy it locally for testing and in SharePoint for real use.
Chapter 5, Using Visual Studio Code and Other Editors, shows you how to get started with Visual Studio Code, the free editor from Microsoft that fully supports SharePoint Framework projects. You will also learn how to use Visual Studio 2015/2017 if you are more familiar with them.
Chapter 6, Packaging and Deploying Solutions, once development is done, developers need to package and deploy their code in an orderly and managed fashion. You’ll learn about the tools to aid you in this task and how to manually deploy your code to SharePoint.
Chapter 7, Working with SharePoint Content, is the next logical step when implementing solutions with SharePoint Framework. You’ll frequently need to access SharePoint-hosted data such as lists and documents. You will also learn using mock data to quickly get your code working before further testing against live data.
Chapter 8, Working with the Web Part Property Pane, shows you how to create solutions that allow parameters and values from user input, such as settings data for a web part. This way your code can run dynamically regardless of where it is deployed.
Chapter 9, Using React and Office UI Fabric React Components, explains that Microsoft realized early on that developers prefer other frameworks, such as React, and might need to provide a unified UI that implements Microsoft’s design language for SharePoint and Office. With React and Office UI Fabric React you’ll learn how to combine these two frameworks with SharePoint Framework projects.
Chapter 10, Working with Other JavaScript Frameworks, will teach you how to use other popular frameworks, such as jQuery and Angular, to implement your solutions while still using SharePoint Framework
Chapter 11, Troubleshooting and Debugging SharePoint Framework Solutions, discusses efficient troubleshooting techniques to help you find common problems you might encounter. Debugging a SharePoint Framework solution is slightly different from traditional server-side debugging, and this chapter will teach you how to debug your code.
Chapter 12, SharePoint APIs and Microsoft Graph, will give you a run-down of the SharePoint APIs and how they differ from each other. You’ll learn how to access the APIs, and also how to employ Microsoft Graph, the fabric that provides knowledge for most things in Office 365 and Azure Active Directory.
Chapter 13, The Future of SharePoint Customizations, provides a glimpse into the future and what SharePoint Framework means for developers from now on. As development models come and go, we give you several ideas how developers should approach this major change.
What you need for this book
SharePoint 2016 Farm or SharePoint Online tenant (as part of an Office 365 subscription)
Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio 2015/2017
Web browser (Chrome or Internet Explorer or Firefox)
Internet access
Who this book is for
This book is for developers who want to start developing solutions for SharePoint 2016 and/or SharePoint Online using SharePoint Framework. It is also for developers who are already familiar with SharePoint’s development models of the past and who are ready to start using SharePoint Framework for their future projects. Though SharePoint experience is not required, you should have a general understanding of the capabilities that SharePoint provides. We’ll provide a brief overview of SharePoint as well. It is also helpful to have an understanding of JavaScript-based web development.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in the text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Create another file, calledMockSharePointClient.ts, in the same folder that the web part is located."
A block of code is set as follows:
import { Environment, EnvironmentType } from '@microsoft/sp-core-library'; import { ISPListItem } from "./ISPListItem"; import MockSharePointClient from "./MockSharePointClient";
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
gulp serve
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Write inTeam site name, for example, SPFX-testing."
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important to us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply e-mail [email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
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Downloading the example code
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Errata
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Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at [email protected], and we will do our best to address the problem.
Introducing SharePoint Online for Developers
SharePoint Online is a core part of Office 365, which is a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud service from Microsoft. SharePoint Online (SPO) is one of the services in Office 365 that companies and organizations typically purchase when they move parts or all of their infrastructure and services to a public cloud service.
In this chapter, we'll take a lap around Office 365 and SharePoint Online, with a strong focus on development models and features that are relevant to you as a developer. In addition we'll provision a new SharePoint site collection that will aid us in testing code we'll write in upcoming chapters. At the end of this chapter, you'll have a good overview of SharePoint Online and the development models that have been, and some of which still are, available to you in on-premises SharePoint and SharePoint Online.
What is SharePoint Online?
SharePoint Online is, depending, who you ask, a development platform, collaboration service, file management system, and intranet service. It's the logical successor and partially a replacement for SharePoint, the on-premises collaboration and productivity platform. It also (partially or fully depending on the business case) replaces file shares, email attachments (through Outlook's support for OneDrive for Business, which is technically part of SharePoint/SharePoint Online), messaging boards, and similar needs for intra-organization or cross-organizational collaboration.
SharePoint Online is a collection of services bundled together, and these are
SharePoint team sites
SharePoint publishing sites
Search
User profiles
InfoPath Forms Service for rich and fillable online forms
Business Connectivity Services
(
BCS
) for integrated backend data to SharePoint
SharePoint add-ins (formerly apps)
In marketing terms, OneDrive for Business is a separate service, but it shares a lot of the same thinking, vision, and in some parts, APIs with SharePoint Online.
Depending on who is accessing SharePoint Online, it can act as a simple team site offering a common storage for documents (typically Office files, such as Word and Excel documents), a messaging board, a blog, and a place to store organizational data such as software licensing information or employee contact information.
SharePoint Online supports accessing content through a web interface, through Office clients and APIs. In some scenarios, content can be accessed through a mapped network drive using WebDAV but this is more or less a legacy way of accessing documents and files stored in SharePoint.
In the following sections, we'll walk you through the essential concepts of SharePoint Online, on a level that we feel is relevant for any developer aiming to work with SharePoint Online.
SharePoint sites and site collections
Each SharePoint site is a separate place for storing content. Each site belongs to not more than one site collection. Think of SharePoint sites as folders, and site collections as a drive letter or hard drive partitions. The analogy is slightly lacking, but for now, it's sufficient for relaying the essential concepts of SharePoint Online.
Organizations create one or more site collections and use site collections typically as security boundaries. One site collection could be the intranet, another could be an extranet for specific partner companies or customers. A third one could act as the Board of Directors' secure site collection for storing highly sensitive documents. Each site collection can hold one or more sites, but they always have one site, which will be the root site of a given site collection.
Sites are the common building block for SharePoint Online services, such as intranet and extranet. You could build a very nice intranet using just one site collection, and then using just one site within the site collection. In the real world, however, you would typically need to structure your content and data among multiple sites, and possibly multiple site collections.
In the following illustration, you can see a high-level overview of what SharePoint Online is. On the left-most side, you see site collections, which are made up of sites and possible subsites. Each site can then hold relevant configuration data and SharePoint artefacts such as document libraries and lists.
SharePoint document libraries
SharePoint sites store information, which requires different types of containers. One type of container is a document library. A document library can be used to store files, including Office documents, text files, media files, and similar content. Most SharePoint sites have, by default, one or more document libraries provisioned and you are free to create more as needed.
Document libraries can either have a modern user experience or a classic user experience. This is due to the changes Microsoft is rolling out over several months (or sometimes even years), which in turn allows for customers to decide when to deploy new and drastic changes, such as a new user experience for something as central as a document library.
The modern user experience is fully responsive and has a fresh look. All essential tooling is available in a simple toolbar and the ribbon interface from the Office 2007/2010 era is gone:
The classic experience is still very much in use; it is supported and, in certain scenarios, works better. This holds especially true for situations where users have used SharePoint Online for several years and are very accustomed to the classic experience:
Both views relay almost identical information, but the classic experience also exposes the ribbon UI, which in turns hides (or shows, depending on context) a lot of additional tooling:
One of the challenges for developers with the ribbon UI has always been the cumbersome approach to modifying, hiding, or adding custom buttons in the ribbon. While it's possible, it's certainly not a task customers would request initially. Users are familiar with the default buttons, and changing or disabling essential buttons for something else will most certainly confuse users.
Each document in a document library holds metadata. Metadata is a larger topic, and not in the scope of this book, suffice to say that metadata in SharePoint Online document libraries is used to reveal and store information about files, and data in general. Metadata can be used to search files and different views on data can be shown, based on metadata filtering, sorting, and selections.
The classic view for modifying metadata is very bare bones but also easy to use:
The modern view for modifying metadata is more modern, but might involve a little learning curve for users accustomed to the classic view:
Notice how metadata in the modern view is shown upon selection of a file, while in the classic view the view is completely different and the context of other files is hidden.
SharePoint lists
Besides document libraries, SharePoint sites can hold lists. Technically, lists are identical to document libraries but rather than storing binary files, they store other data such as text, numbers, selections, or even attachment files. Lists are typically used to create ad-hoc data structures to hold data that can be sorted, filtered, and queried. Document libraries often act as a file store and lists act as a data or information store without really storing physical files.
While document libraries are just that: document libraries, lists come in all sizes and varieties. The common base list is a custom list, which is essentially an empty list with just a few data columns as a template. Other list templates include contact lists (predefined person data columns), links (URLs and descriptive text columns), and announcements (news-style items with headlines and summary text), to mention a few:
By creating a custom list you can easily build a data store for any kind of data your application might require at a later time. The list can be queried similarly to how you would query a relational database table. It's a graphical representation of an SQL table, with the addition of built-in functionality such as graphical views, sorting, filtering, and integration to other Office 365 services.
By adding new columns (metadata) to a list, you effectively provide additional ways to store data. The Title column is the base column, which you can later rename if you choose to.
To add a new column, simply define the datatype and other properties and it will automatically be added to the default view:
When you add a new column of the datatype Multiple lines of text, you effectively create a new text box that can be filled out when adding a new line to your custom list:
This data can now be saved and is immediately visible and accessible on the list:
It's crucial to understand that you have a built-in, scalable, secure, and ready-to-use platform for storing data within SharePoint lists and document libraries. Instead of always designing, provisioning, and maintaining a separate SQL database with custom-created tables, you can always provision your application's data to a SharePoint list or library, depending on which works best for you.
SharePoint web parts
Web parts are the building blocks for SharePoint pages. Pages sit in a document library and provide a graphical view that can be customized or hand-built depending on need.
Each document library and list, upon provisioning, create a web part representation of itself that can be embedded on a SharePoint page. As such, web parts are an easy way to create a clickable portal page to quickly access document libraries and lists or for simply resurfacing information from within SharePoint structures.
There are also a few dozen pre-created web parts that provide additional functionality, such as embedding comments on a page or retrieving an RSS feed and rendering a nice formatted list out of the feed items. Developers often create custom web parts that do the kind of actions that default web parts lack. This could include custom buttons, views, fields, and using data stored within SharePoint and providing a nicer interface for modifying said data.
By editing a SharePoint page, users can rearrange existing web parts on a page or add new ones and remove existing ones:
Adding a web part by editing the page and then selecting Insert | Web Part provides a list of all supported and installed web parts on the service.
The interface is a bit retro in the sense that it involves a lot of dragging, dropping, and popup menus to finalize the web part settings:
When editing a web part, the WEB PART tool pane (on the right) becomes visible, allowing manipulation of the Web Part Properties. This includes the title text and possible parameters to instruct the web part to act differently.
Why SharePoint Online?
So far, we've taken a whirlwind tour of SharePoint Online, barely scratching the surface of the default functionality within a SharePoint site. Considering the first version of SharePoint was introduced in 2001, a lot of has evolved since then. But at the same a lot has surprisingly stayed the same: document libraries, lists, and sites more or less share the same concepts as they did over 15 years ago.
Today, companies choose SharePoint Online for several reasons. In our opinion, the three main reasons companies choose SharePoint Online are:
Compatibility and cooperation with Office suite applications, including cross-platform support on macOS and Office Online browser users
A readily available intranet and extranet platform that works with single sign-on (using Azure Active Directory as the identity provider)
It works natively with Exchange, Skype for Business, and OneDrive for Business, which are the default choices of productivity tools for many organizations
Most probably the development aspects of SharePoint Online are not the primary reason for companies to choose SharePoint Online. Interoperability, common standards, and well-documented APIs are critical, but often not the main driver for choosing SharePoint Online to start with.
Microsoft claims* that over 90 percent of Fortune 500 users are using Microsoft's cloud services; this, of course, includes both Microsoft Azure and Office 365. While the claim is very impressive, it does not mean that all 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies are solely using Office 365 and/or Microsoft Azure; they might be using Amazon's AWS or any number of other hosting or public cloud offerings available, together with Office 365. The reality, though, is that over 100 million users are accessing Office 365 workloads every month. This is an amazing number of users who have enrolled to a paid license and are actively using any number of the multiple services Office 365 has to offer. As such, development for SharePoint Online is something that is in demand from both small and large organizations and enterprises, as well ISVs who need to implement their own products to fit with Office 365.
Another reason that organizations choose SharePoint Online is that they might already be paying for it. When they initially purchased a license for Office 365 to maybe use Exchange Online for their emails, they typically also purchased a SharePoint Online license for users. Nowadays this includes 1 terabyte of storage to hold all SharePoint Online content, as well as the majority of SharePoint Online functionality. Comparing this free offering to an on-premises SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint 2016 deployment often means that SPO becomes a compelling option. While the on-premises deployment of SharePoint typically requires at least 3-6 months for full installation, roll-out for users, customization, configuration, and managing--the equivalent in Office 365-SharePoint Online is already there and ready to use. This is not to say that SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises are identical; however, they do share more or less the same set of features that most users tend to need.
