Saturday 29 June 2013

SharePoint Host Apps - User Permissions

Problem:  How do I give users or groups permissions in a SP Host App?  This post is not looking at giving the App Web permissions against the SharePoint Site.  It merely looks at giving users rights to work within the app.

Initial Hypothesis:
SharePoint has a structure Object hierarchy that developers can secure users against namely: SPSite (Site Collection), SPWeb (Sitess/Webs), SPList (Lists/Document Libraries) and SPItem (Rows).  Based on the hierarchy I initially assumed SP Apps would maintain their own security.  Well this would get rather confusing as you would need to maintain the host web and the app web user permissions.

There is no UI in the App web to be setting security but on the UI you can get to the lists permission page.  In the SP Hosted App, navigate to the list, in my case the url is: http://dev-d8f436fea0378f.apps.dev.local/SPHostedApp/Lists/Comment/AllItems.aspx this takes me to the "Comments" list.  I click the "List" tab on the ribbon.  Click the "Shared With" button and Choose "Advanced".


Here we can stop inheriting the security permissions for the list.
I thought I could set the App webs permissions by selecting the "Web" link.  You receive an error.

Resolution:  You need to stop inheriting permissions on the Host App (parent) and then the App web inherits theses permissions.

How if works:
 

Friday 7 June 2013

Why I like VS/TFS 2012 no I mean VS/TFS 2013


Visual Studio (VS) 2013 and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2013 is being released in the next few weeks - that was quick.  I'm just getting comfortable with VS 2012 and the announcement comes that VS 2013 is being released later this month.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/06/03/visual-studio-2013.aspx

So, this is going to be a blog on VS 2012 with TFS, my number 1 favourite new feature in VS 2012 is local workspaces.  Pre VS2012 all workspaces were Server based workspaces.  "Local" workspaces differ in that when you go offline you have version control on your local machine.  You can rollback/compare to an old version.  So for me and my laptop on client sites I find it a big improvement.  Very simply this is how GitHub works (from my extremely limited knowledge of GitHub).  You have local version control and this is synced up with the central source control repository.

Another feature worth looking at will be Release Management.  I am working with TeamCity to build my Infrastructure (PowerCli for VMware and Powershell to build SQL Server.  Autoinstaller runs the SP part).
TFS 2012 - Scrum template home page

Team Rooms are already on TFSPreview, seems like a nice idea - not sure how the takeup will be from devs.

Saturday 1 June 2013

Retrieving lookup list columns using REST SharePoint 2013 API

Problem:  I have 2 related SharePoint lists: 1) Question and a Child (linked) list 2)Comment.  I need to perform an JS call using jQuery to retrieve a specific comment item and I need to also know the Title field from it's related parent list (Question).  The 2 lists are shown below.  The post Creating related lists for SP Hosted Apps using VS2012 show you how to do this.

Resolution:
Open you browser  and check the query works:
http://dev-d8f436fea03755.apps.dev.local/SPHostedApp/_api/web/lists/getByTitle('Comment')/items(1)?$select=*,Question/Title&$expand=Question/Title
(replace the url)

jQuery Ajax code I used to call the REST API is shown below:

The ajax call is made in the document.Ready() method call.