As a developer, your first few Office 365 projects are bound to throw you a curve ball or two and present you with some interesting technical limitations that weren’t present in the old development paradigm. This session walks through the development of the KWizCom Cascading LookApp and highlights the decisions, tips and tricks used to build a Custom Field Type Office 365 App.

1. Building a Custom Column App
(Office 365)
Lessons learnt from building the
KWizCom Cascading LookApp

2. KWizCom Corporation
• Founded in 2005
• Headquartered in Toronto
• Global vendor of SharePoint Add-Ons
• 5000+ customers worldwide

3. Kevin Vieira (kevin@kwizcom.com)
 Product Development Manager
at KWizCom
 Working with SharePoint since
2003
 Manage development lifecycle
of add-ons for SharePoint
2007/2010/2013

4. Agenda
1. So what is a custom column app?
2. Everything you need to know about the KWizCom
Cascading LookApp
3. KWizCom Cascading LookApp in Action
4. Decisions, Tips and Tricks that went into the
development of the KWizCom Cascading LookApp

5. So what is a custom column app?
 It’s an app that extends the functionality of existing
columns in order to bridge the gaps and limitations
of Office 365 online SharePoint offerings.
 The app doesn’t actually create a new column
type, but instead uses clever client side tricks to
super charge existing columns.

6. Everything you need to know about
KWizCom Cascading LookApp
Turns SharePoint Lookup columns into "Super Lookup"
columns with the following capabilities:
1. Cross-site Lookups

http://contoso.com/sites/team -> http://contoso.com/sites/hr
2. Cascaded Lookups

Region > Country > City
3. Filter Lookup by view
4. Quickly created new items in the looked-up list

7. What does it look like?

8. What does it look like (Settings page)?

9. What does it look like (Settings page)?

10. What does it look like (Settings page)?

11. Where can I get it?

12. KWizCom Cascading LookApp in Action
DEMO

13. Decisions, Tips and Tricks
 TRICK: How to make sure your external javascript
files get loaded in a particular order without a
ScriptLink

14. Decisions, Tips and Tricks
 TIP: Protect your javascript code with a tool like
http://javascriptobfuscator.com/default.aspx

15. Decision, Tips and Tricks
 TIP: Query strings are very important. You need
SharePoint to tell your external website important
information about where in SharePoint it is coming
from.

16. Decisions, Tips and Tricks
 Decision: Plan for licenses. Even with apps there is no
getting around licenses. You will need to plan for any
type of licenses that will incur with using apps.
Licensing is only applicable to apps that have been
purchased from the Office apps store. Apps that
were developed internally or from other sources
other than Microsoft may have different licensing
requirements that you may need to account for
when deploying apps in SharePoint.

17. Decisions, Tips and Tricks
 TIP: Learn by example. Microsoft has released more
than 100 sample apps for SharePoint in its MSDN
site. This list is been constantly updated with more
sample apps targeted towards REST
API, CSOM, JSOM, BCS etc.
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/officeapps/Apps-forSharePoint-sample-64c80184/view/SamplePack#content

18. Contact Info




Kevin Vieira
Email: kevin@kwizcom.com
Website: http://www.kwizcom.com
Blog: http://kwizcom.blogspot.ca/