SharePoint Framework Nuggets

I guess that almost every application or solution you ever built has contained some portions of a logging mechanism. And how many of you have written your own - yup, all of you! But what about the SharePoint Framework - yes, it has built-in logging! How to log in the SharePoint Framework Logging is a very convenient and easy way to keep track of events happening, instead of having breakpoints, or in JavaScript even worse - alerts. The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has as all decent frameworks a built-in logging mechanism, albeit very simple, but still yet valuable. It’s contained in the @microsoft/sp-client-base module and the class is called Log. To use it in your SharePoint Framework solutions you need to import it as follows:

Do you write code that potentially can throw an error or an exception? Oh, you don’t - but sure you use a web service or external service or something that can throw an error. Well, it is you responsibility to handle the error and make sure to inform the user in a good way that something bad happened. With that I mean, do not show just a Guid. With the SharePoint Framework being all client side I think it is important to have control of your client side Web Parts and make sure that you properly handle and display error messages in a consistent way. In this short post I will not go in to the JavaScript error handling details, but rather show you another nugget in the SharePoint Framework that helps you render error messages in a standardized and consistent way.

SharePoint Framework is all about rendering stuff on the client side, avoiding the long overdue ASP.NET Web Forms technology that SharePoint (Online) is still fundamentally based on. When rendering things client side everything is done asynchronously, to avoid locking down the UI threads and having a user experience that is fluent. In order to give the user good feedback that things are happening in the background, you need to have some kind of visual cue that tells the user - hey I’m doing stuff now, gimme a minute. There are thousands of different ways to do this and everyone does it differently; ranging from animated gifs to “loading” texts. And everyone using different methods does not always help with the user experience - so why don’t we have a common way to do this?