Book Image

SharePoint Development with the SharePoint Framework

By : Jussi Roine, Olli Jääskeläinen
Book Image

SharePoint Development with the SharePoint Framework

By: Jussi Roine, Olli Jääskeläinen

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Loading external packages

If your project requires external libraries, such as jQuery or similar, commonly used libraries, you might consider loading these from CDN. You can always bundle them within your project, but this means that your packages that are deployed will grow in size. Also, maintaining or updating these external libraries quickly becomes time-consuming, as you need to manually track what version of each library is being loaded on a page.

A solution for this is to load these external libraries from a CDN. The process is quite straightforward:

  1. First, install the npm package for your library. In our example, this would be jQuery:
npm install jquery --save
  1. Next, run the npm install to ensure that all packages are updated:
npm i 
  1. Then, open the config/config.json file within your project and look up the externals portion of the file. Update this to reflect that you'll load jQuery from a CDN, with a globalName of jQuery. Your external configuration in the file should...