Timed Jobs in Azure Provider-Hosted Apps

2014-01-202014-11-30 Andy BurnsAzure, azure, claims, Office 365, ProviderHostedApps, scheduler, SharePointApps, SharePointOnlineCredentials, SP2013 DevelopmentLeave a comment

As I’ve described recently, I’m working on a Provider-Hosted SharePoint App that’s hosted in Azure. I’ve said previously about using Remote Event Receivers, and this whole app is really about sending emails from SharePoint Online (which we’re doing via SendGrid).

One of the things the customer wants is ‘timed’ emails – that is, some sort of service that talks to SharePoint Online, checks to see if there are any items in a list that are due for action, and if so sends an alert email. Simple enough, but with one minor problem. There are no timer jobs in SharePoint Apps. And you can’t put them into Office 365. And Azure doesn’t have an equivalent … yet. Continue reading “Timed Jobs in Azure Provider-Hosted Apps” →

Register Remote Event Receivers on the HOST web

2014-01-102014-11-30 Andy BurnsAzure, azure, Event Receivers, Office 365, ProviderHostedApps, RemoteEventReceivers, SP2013 Development2 Comments

The project that I’m working on requires that I add remote event receivers to the host web for my Provider-hosted app. This is a little unusual – most of the stuff I found about remote event receivers was using the app web. It turns out, though, that it is possible, and there is a good explanation of how it works by Johnny Tordgeman on CodeProject. Rather than repeat all he’s said, I suggest you take a look. I just want to expand on some of the things I learnt doing this, that he didn’t mention. Continue reading “Register Remote Event Receivers on the HOST web” →

App Deployment Error: "Your app handles the uninstalling app event"

2014-01-092014-11-30 Andy BurnsAzure, azure, Office 365, ProviderHostedApps, RemoteEventReceivers, SharePointApps, SP2013 Development3 Comments

When trying to do an F5-Deploy of a Provider hosted app from Visual Studio, I got this error during the deployment:

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Uninstall app for SharePoint’: Your app handles the uninstalling app event. Ensure that the Windows Azure Cloud Web Service project is deployed to the emulator prior to uninstalling the app.

This happened just after the step “Uninstall app for SharePoint” in the process. Continue reading “App Deployment Error: "Your app handles the uninstalling app event"” →

Check the ClientId/ClientSecret of your App

2014-01-082014-11-30 Andy BurnsAzure, azure, ProviderHostedApps, SP2013 DevelopmentLeave a comment

I have had a problem today that a provider hosted app that I’ve been working on would deploy and work in an F5-Debug deployment, but when I tried to do a proper deployment, well, it wouldn’t work. I already thought I knew what I needed to change between an F5 and a proper deployment – so what was wrong? Continue reading “Check the ClientId/ClientSecret of your App” →

Sending Email from Azure with SendGrid

2013-12-202014-11-30 Andy BurnsAzure, azure, Email, sendgrid, SP2013 DevelopmentLeave a comment

In SharePoint Online I need to send email(s) when a user updates a document. Who this email goes to involves some fairly complex logic – which we’ll ignore for this post. So how do we send the email? SharePoint Online doesn’t allow you to use SPUtility.SendEmail() or System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient – so unless you’re using standard alerts, or the workflow “Send Email” activity, well, you’re going to have to look elsewhere. I didn’t think SharePoint designer Workflows were quite up to the complexity of it, so I started to look elsewhere – at Remote Event Receivers, provider-hosted in Azure.

This leads to the question “can Azure send email?” I can imagine a few reasons why it maybe shouldn’t (think “spam”). Continue reading “Sending Email from Azure with SendGrid” →

Using JSOM to query SharePoint 2013 lists with Taxonomy Fields

2013-10-292015-02-05 Andy Burnsclientobjectmodel, JavaScript, JSOM, Office 365, SP2013 Development, Taxonomy9 Comments

So, I’d an interesting problem. I have a SharePoint 2013 list that uses a Managed Metadata (or ‘Taxonomy’) field. I need to, through the JavaScript Client Object Model, get all items that have a particular value or a child of that value on the taxonomy tree. As an example, here’s my taxonomy: termSet Sounds like it should be simple to query this, right? Well, not so much. Continue reading “Using JSOM to query SharePoint 2013 lists with Taxonomy Fields” →

Looking up against Large Lists in Office 365

2013-10-242014-11-30 Andy Burnsautocomplete, JavaScript, jQuery, Large Lists, Office 365, QueryThrottleException, QueryThrottling, SP2013 Development14 Comments

So, I had an issue that I’ve a customer who wanted to have some items look up against a large list. (In fact, it was a large document library). This large list had more than 5000 items. This is a little unfortunate, due to a painful and annoying quirk in SharePoint’s design. Continue reading “Looking up against Large Lists in Office 365” →

Issues with getting the SP.ClientContext in SharePoint 2013

2013-07-162014-11-30 Andy Burnsclientobjectmodel, JavaScript, JSOM, SP2013 Development2 Comments

So, I’m migrating a solution from SP2010 to 2013. In the JavaScript for part of the solution, I use the JavaScript client-side object model (JSOM). This involves getting the current ClientContext for the site:

var clientContext = new SP.ClientContext.get_current();

Unfortunately, ClientContext was null, so I kept getting Null Reference exceptions.

“Weird”, I thought, “This worked in 2010”. Now, my solution has a very similar piece of code elsewhere in it, so I went and tested it – and it worked. Even weirder.

Next up, I tried using a SP.SOD.executeOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded() call around the code where I got the ClientContext. Surely it was just a matter of waiting for the JavaScript file ‘sp.js’ to load? Well, it never loaded. With these two lines…

SP.SOD.executeOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(function () { alert('SP.Runtme.js Loaded'); }, 'SP.Runtime.js');
SP.SOD.executeOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(function () { alert('SP.js Loaded'); }, 'SP.js');

…no alerts were shown. On the page that works, they both get shown nearly instantly.

Okay, so it’s not my code then, it’s that the JSOM isn’t initializing, but only on one particular page. That sucks. What can I do to initialise it? Well, I found this post describing the same problem, but for publishing pages. Mine isn’t – it’s an application page – but I suspected it might be the same issue. And I checked MSDN which describes initialising sp.js.

I added this line:

SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', function () { });

And my code began working again on this page. So it seems that for some pages in SharePoint 2013 the Client Object Model isn’t necessarily initialized.

The Importance of knowing Regular Expressions

2013-01-122014-11-30 Andy BurnsDevelopment, regex, SP20132 Comments

It’s something that always mystifies me, it does seem that a lot of developers don’t know regular expression syntax very well. This came up when I was on some SharePoint 2013 training just before Christmas.

SharePoint 2013 introduces something called “Routing Rules”. These are rules that allow you to direct traffic to different front-end servers (or pools of servers), allowing you to isolate traffic, route to better health servers, etc.. Spence Harbar has a very good article about it.

Anyway, one some of the criteria that you can match rules on are Regular Expressions. However, SharePoint does warn you that Regex routing rules are slower – this is unsurprising. But how much slower than, say, a ‘Starts with’ or ‘Ends with’ rule? And on the Ignite training I did wonder about the efficiency of their example… Continue reading “The Importance of knowing Regular Expressions” →

HTML 5 – Email Address Validation Regex

2012-10-182014-11-30 Andy BurnsDevelopment, Email, regex2 Comments

And interesting one to stumble upon – the ‘official‘ regex for validating a email address:

Edit: I’ve had to break this down into parts – for some reason WordPress throws a 403 error if I don’t. I think it sees this regex as a security risk!

Before the @ sign:
^[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&’*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+

The @ sign and after:
@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(?:.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*$

Reads like it should work pretty well to me. I didn’t realise before the @ was so generous. And you could shrink it by using a case insensitive operator.

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