Getting Started with Microsoft Graph and SharePoint

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Jeremy Thaek with me today is Jeremy Kelly hi glad to be here thanks for joining me mate so in this video we're going to talk about the SharePoint API it's on the Microsoft graph and I guess my first question is like if I'm not a SharePoint person I've not been around this space why is a developer what it makes sense for me to use SharePoint API so Microsoft graph that's a really good question SharePoint has really become the backbone of a bunch of different features in office 365 so whether you just want to store your collaborative documents in a shared location for your team whether you're using Microsoft teams and want access to the information that backs that if you're using an office 365 group all of those things are backed by SharePoint sites so you get the power of document libraries to store documents and files you get the power of Lists which are great tools and you can then power those with power absent flow on the UX side of things and you can use graph API is to work with the data under the hood and then there's this notion of pages as well I guess that you could create pages and have those as tabs in a team yeah so modern pages have been a great new feature kind of moving forward from the traditional website design and SharePoint into a truly modern modern authoring experience and those we have a beta API available for working with those today we're working hard on getting that expanded and more features available but yeah pages are great for communicating status about projects for creating internal marketing documents about a project we use them quite quite heavily within our own team here at here at Microsoft and one of the benefits I found as a developer with SharePoint lists which is kind of just storing data as opposed to files like a document library would be was that you know it doesn't mean I have to go spin up a database or something to store information so like what do you see customers using lists for that kind of that level you can use it for all kinds of things I use it personally for recording submissions from team which are suggestions for four cool things we might want to do on the team um so I have a basic signup flow that has some custom columns that describe you know what is the thing you want me to share what are some notes about it and then I can go in and fill in things like due dates or when was this featured all right any kind of metadata that I might want to store about some process that's going on or a task list SharePoint's really great at that and I think our API is do a pretty good job of letting you access all of that data programmatically you can create columns which is great also so if you're building a solution in a client that you want to install effectively some data into SharePoint you can do that and have it all provision at runtime as well and there's different data types yep the usual date times and choices any times text field it's all different sure president there are a few Calton things that we're still working on some column types that aren't supported yet but we'll get there and have full coverage in time that's awesome and so with that like if I'm creating those lists I'm creating those documents that's storing it in the customers site it's not I'm not having to do anything on my side of them at the dev site of where that data gets right so you justyou can access either by ID which is our preferred method because everything in the graph is generally referenced by d by ID but you can also do it by path and we'll take a look when we get to our demos we'll show how you can access sites by path as well because that's when most people are thinking about how they're working that's what they're doing is the game the path to the site rather than the ID to the site so awesome and so like anything the graph Explorer is definitely the best place to go look into the SharePoint API so do you want to show some of these right now sure let's take a look at what we can do awesome all right so I've got a demo user here and we're looking at their onedrive for business and you can see I've got a whole bunch of files already here and let's go over to graph explorer where we can start seeing how we manipulate that with the actual api's so by default graph explorer is giving me the me context and if I want the onedrive part of that I can just go me drive me drive is going to give me my onedrive account which ever user is logged in so as a developer I don't have to worry about who logged in what their ID is even what their email address is we give you the shortcut that translates all that information under the hood so if I was an outlook.com user it would show me on my onedrive yeah that I have my personal but if I logged in with my corporate yep credentials I'd see my wonderful business yeah I use it with my personal account look at my music library from the file system all the time just because I'm that kind of developer so yeah it works great for both business and personal same paths so I've got the drive here and the drive is really the object of the onedrive so you can see this doesn't list any of the files in the output but it does give me information like what the web URL is what type it is so this says business here because we're logged into onedrive for business who created it in this case the system account who owns it so let's actually look at some of the more useful parts here so I can do drive route route is going to be the root folder so now I have a pointer and you can see here there's a folder facet in the output and it says hey there's 34 children here which are gonna be the top level of files and folders in my in my onedrive for business so I'll had children and now I can start to get some interesting things here so I've got a set of nodes that all represent the folders and files that are here so I have a contoso electronics it looks like this is probably a folder because I don't see an extension on that and there's the folder facet again it says that has 13 children and if we keep scrolling down we can probably find a file there's the images folder there's private info and here we go here's annual financial report draft dot docx so now I've got file that's gonna have a different set of information associated with it it's all really great so now I can start working with things I can get their IDs out if I want to continue to work and so typical operations I might want to do within files and folders let's say I want to upload a new file and so that's as easy as simply putting in the name of the file so if I want my file dot txt and the part that I'm going to put into the file is the content so the / content represents what's in there if this were a binary file and I was using this through the SDK I would pass the stream into that but in this case we can just put this is my content exclamation point we're going to do a put operation this only works in graph explorer when I'm signed in as a particular user if I used the default demo it doesn't let me modify so I've signed in so we'll do a put we got some information back so now this gives me the same information as if I were accessing a file that already existed so we can look at some of the output here if I want to pass this file over to another service I can use the download URL to pass over say to Microsoft Azure if I were running cognitive services on on input if I didn't want to process the content directly so that's great I've got all the other data there's the file name my file dot txt let's quickly pop back over to onedrive and there's my file dot txt that we just uploaded a few seconds ago we're going to click on that and voila this is my content so we did a quick put right from graph explorer we uploaded a new file the other thing we can do that is super useful if you're building a rich client integration is instead of working with its data I could get the onedrive previewer to be able to show that file so I can use the preview API here and I'm gonna do a post we're gonna clear out the body of the request I'm gonna run the query and it's gonna come back with a get URL this could return a post for certain file types but we're gonna copy this URL paste it into a new window just so we can see what happens and what I'm gonna get is one drives viewer that I can embed into an iframe so if I were building a SharePoint framework web part or any other client application that can host an iframe I can now render that file and that includes all 320 file types that onedrive supports I can programmatically get a preview URL to embed into my application so that's pretty normal it's already cool yep so I think that's most of the basics we've done download we've done upload we've done preview you can do all kinds of other things if you want to look at the the data that's in the file if you want to manipulate sharing links and send permissions we're just going to switch this back to it yet and you can see here I also i used the file name in order to get access to the file right i didn't have to have the ID there are cases where IDs are helpful they're more more performant in some cases but especially for uploading files where you don't have an ID yet you just give it the arbitrary name of the thing you're looking for specifically in the file path and it will it will find it for you and with this show more samples there we actually have pre-baked onedrive samples in graphics boris okay so do you want to explore we can turn these on onedrive is right here I'll click off and so this will give you all of the let's say I want the files that are shared with me I can do Drive shared with me and it will return me all the different files that I've had shared to me and so these samples are a great way to get going and you can always look at the API documentation as well if you're looking for the next level of advanced features so that's just some of the stuff you can do with Microsoft graph and SharePoint there's lots more SharePoint is a very broad product and has lots of capabilities and we're always bringing more to the product as well keeping you busy very very busy so with anything if you want to learn please go to graft at Microsoft com there's a getting start at the top you can select your language and there's tutorials and QuickStart so you can run and you can go play with these ship whenever you guys that Jeremy and his team have been working on so big thank you again and please give us any feedback