Latest Extending SharePoint with ADAL and the Microsoft Graph API topics

When Marc and I were at Ignite this past September, #SharePoint was the most tweeted hashtag. We heard a lot about the new SharePoint Framework (SPFx), which was clearly the focus for developers. But another oft-discussed technology topic centered on the expansion of the Microsoft Graph API (MSGraphAPI). It’s clearly going to be the API of choice going forward to access all Office 365 content, but its maturity is still early days. At Ignite, Microsoft announced the beta endpoints for accessing SharePoint through the Microsoft Graph API. Overall I think this is a good thing, as the API has significantly better adherence to the OData standard compared to the SharePoint REST services. That said, as users of the SharePoint REST services we’re very used to the simplicity of those calls and we literally pay no attention to authentication if we’re operating on SharePoint pages. The tokens we need are already made available right on the page, we just pluck them out, and so there’s little effort. [Continue Reading]

Introduction In Part 1 of this series I covered all the setup needed to start your Microsoft Graph API (MSGraphAPI) client side widget. In Part 2, we’re going to dive into the many ways to use adal.js and its counterpart adal-angular.js. I’ve included the same resources I included in Part 1, under the section for ADAL you’ll find a lot of references to Cloud Identity blog by Vittorio Bertocci who has blogged extensively on the library, explaining in depth the technical workings of it. I encourage you to read those posts I’ve included below to get a complete understanding of the library. Also, included in the references is a post about utilizing ADAL in the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). As is, ADAL was never meant to be used as part of a widget architecture as ADAL isn’t a singleton, so if you have multiple web parts on your page all referencing ADAL you’re going to have issues. The post Call the MSGraphAPI using OAuth from your web part (no longer available) gives you an extension that will help isolate ADAL so that you can utilize it as part of a more strongly developed widget pattern. Since my demo is just that, and since my solution will be the only one running on the page that uses the ADAL library I’m not going to address those modifications here. But, I encourage you do so if that is part of your use case. [Continue Reading]

Introduction In Part 1, I discussed the background and setup information you would need to successfully embark on a client site widget for SharePoint that accesses the Microsoft Graph API (MSGraphAPI). In Part 2, we went in depth to the various ways of utilizing the adal.js and adal-angular.js libraries for authentication. Now, here in Part 3 we’re going to get right into the nuts and bolts of a real solution that does the following: [Continue Reading]

Introduction When I last left you (in Part 3) we had completed the round-trip journey that is learning all the facets to accessing the Microsoft Graph API (MSGraph) through an Azure Application and the ADAL.js library. A significant portion of our time was spent simply on the different ways to leverage ADAL.js depending on the framework you were using. In this next installment we’re going to go one step further and streamline our implementation of ADAL, in AngularJS specifically, but with broader implications to any web based framework. [Continue Reading]