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)

TypeScript basics in the SharePoint Framework

Open HelloWorldWebPart.ts located in the src\webparts\helloWorld folder:

If you are unfamiliar with TypeScript, the contents of this file might look a bit scary at first, but believe me, after you get familiar with TypeScript, the contents make more sense than pure JavaScript. TypeScript adds typing information and more expressive notations of ECMAScript 6 that can be used because of how TypeScript can actually compile the JavaScript to follow ECMAScript 5, which in turn can be interpreted by most browsers used today. The main motivation for developers to learn TypeScript is to make JavaScript more accessible, especially for developers coming from a .NET background.

The main program in this web part is actually the render() function, which you might be familiar with if you've previously created classic SharePoint web parts as full-trust solutions.

Let's begin with the import statements.

In TypeScript, import is used to import other...