SPServices Stories #13: Durandal SP3: Developing SharePoint SPAs Made Easy

Introduction

Rainer Wittman (@RainerAtSpirit) and I have been emailing back and forth for a few weeks now. He’s been trying out the new alpha of SPServices 2013.01 which includes jQuery promises aka Deferred objects capabilities (soon to be a real release, I promise!) with the Durandal JavaScript framework. Durandal is a framework for building SPAs, or Single Page Applications.

This is something that SharePoint 2013 does to some degree with the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS). If you’re interested in how MDS works, here are some posts that go into more detail about it:

• SharePoint 2013 – Introduction to the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) from Wictor Wilén (@wictor)
• Minimal Download Strategy in SharePoint 2013 from Bjørn Furuknap (@furuknap)

Those of you who are purists will tell me that I’m comparing apples and oranges, and that’s sort of true. However, the goals are similar: send as little of the page transitions down the wire as possible to make those transitions as fluid and responsive as possible. We see this sort of approach more and more, especially in mobile interfaces.

I’ve done SPA-like things even with SharePoint 2007 using AJAX. By maintaining the overall chrome of the page (top nav, Quick Launch, footer) as a constant, we can do something as simple as AJAXing in a new copy of the same page, parsing out the main panel, and replacing it in the user’s current copy of the page in the DOM. You also see this in SharePoint 2010 with the asynchronous refresh capability available with some Web Parts (See: Asynchronous
Update in SharePoint 2010 from @wonderlaura).

If you haven’t heard of Durandal (I hadn’t), here’s some information swiped from the Durandal home page:

Comfortable

We didn’t try to re-invent the wheel. Durandal is built on libs you know and love like jQuery, Knockout and RequireJS. There’s little to learn and building apps feels comfortable and familiar. Dive in and enjoy.

Feature-rich

MVC? MVP? MVVM? Yes. Messaging, navigation, modals? Check. Durandal has the features you need to build whatever apps you can imagine; the apps of today and of tomorrow. Let your creativity soar.

Versatile

Building an Android phone app? An enterprise LOB targeted at Windows? A web gaming platform? No matter how large or small the app, it’s effortless with Durandal….and we give you the tools to develop on any platform, for any platform.

I expect we’ll hear more from Rainer about this cool way of building SharePoint interfaces. As you read through his post below, you’ll probably be very impressed to see that his approach works for SharePoint 2007, 2010, or 2013. If you’re still on 2007 and woulds like to make your installation fell a heck of a lot more “modern”, this is an approach that has legs going forward. You’ll also see some links in his post to live, working demo pages so that you can get a feel for what he is driving at.

This article was originally posted on Rainer’s blog at Durandal SP3: Developing SharePoint SPAs made easy.

Durandal SP3: Developing SharePoint SPAs Made Easy

Hi there,

In the last post I introduced you to Durandal a SPA Framework, which can be used to create SPAs on top of the SharePoint infrastructure. This time we’re going to leverage Marc Anderson’s SPServices as a data service for our SPA.

The obvious advantage is that web services are around for a long time, so one SPA (same code base) runs in SharePoint (2003), 2007, 2010 and 2013.

The obvious disadvantage is that web services are deprecated in 2013, so they might go away with the next major release. If you are already running on 2010/2013 and don’t have to support older browser versions you might want looking into using REST services with JayData or Breeze instead… but that’s worth another story.

Seeing is believing so here a couple of screen shots using IE versions that roughly matches the SP release time.

SharePoint 2013 | IE 10:

SharePoint 2010 | IE 8:

SharePoint 2007 | IE 7:

In SP2007 you’ll notice some issues with the CSS that is used in the SPA otherwise it’s fully functional. That is less an issue with IE7, but more with SP2007 that is running pages in Quirks mode. A quick workaround would be to apply a DOCTYPE to the pages that host your SPA.

SharePoint 2003 | IE 6:

Sorry, I’m out of historic SharePoint VMs. Please give me a shot if somebody has still access to a SP2003 environment. I’d love to add the missing screen shot.

Now, after hopefully getting you excited, here’s the bad news. The demo is using the alpha release 2013.01ALPHA5 of SPServices, so I won’t make the demo code available through Github as usual. I’ll update this post once the next official version of SPServices has been released and tested with Durandal SP3.

The good news is that there are two public available pages that allows you to go hands-on. Both are best viewed with your favorite console open.

1. development version:
2. optimized build:

Without going into the details let see what the Promises demo app is doing when you activate the list route (/#lists).

1. Retrieve information about the lists in the current site via SPServices GetListCollection method (with caching)
2. Retrieve detail information about the selected list via SPServices GetList method and build a mapping that can be used in SPServices SPXmlToJson method (with caching)
3. Retrieve item information via SPServices GetListItems (NO caching)

Update 2013/04/11: The life demo was updated based on some feedback I got. The list overview now produces a configurable row view of lists with meta information like ItemCount and Last Modified. Step 2 and 3 are performed once you select a list.

By opening up the optimized build and filtering the network tab for XHR you can see the three POST requests to lists.asmx nicely lined up. Once you start selecting other lists, you’ll noticed that the number of XHR requests decrease as more and more cached information becomes available.

The development version on the other side shows far more details via the console. That allows you to get familiar with Durandal’s application life cycle and to inspect the Json result of some spdata methods.

After reading so far and hopefully seen the Promises demo in action by yourself, I hope that you share my excitement of the upcoming promise support in SPServices. Once it’s part of an official release SPServices will become a perfect fit for Durandal’s life cycle methods.