Aug 09 2018 07:55 AM
Hi there,
Hopefully someone will be able to address my confusion regarding SharePoint PnP and sandboxed solutions. My understanding so far:
Questions / statements to be validated or disproved:
Given the above, what would be the sweet spot for the PnP? Is it only good for SPFx and turning a bunch of SharePoint Designer customizations into a single deployable unit so far? And if I for example need to provision list workflows then I am stuck with the good old .wsp plus perhaps good old PowerShell scripts for provisioning things like quick launch navigation?
Would appreciate any advice / feedback on this. Thanks!
Aug 09 2018 09:02 AM
Hi, @Dmytro Lapshyn
You are confusing things a bit. I personally like to think that PnP provides solutions to all the problems in SharePoint development (and more than that).
You can start here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/community/community
Also, the GitHub repository is a never-ending list of extremely useful solutions and samples (for both classic and modern experience). Definitively have a look here: https://github.com/sharePoint
In this case, I assume you are referring to provisioning, so in short, I would suggest that you stop investing your time in WSP solutions and start using PnP as soon as possible.
There is a PnP provisioning schema (check the latest version by date) file that you can use in your code editor to get validation.
In short, PnP will probably have a solution for all of your problems! You just need to look for it, but it probably exists! If it doesn't, raise the discussion and someone will offer you some options ;)
Hope this helps you get started and potentially join the community later on :)
Aug 09 2018 09:14 AM
Hi Joel!
Thanks a lot for the prompt reply!
In this case, I assume you are referring to provisioning, so in short, I would suggest that you stop investing your time in WSP solutions and start using PnP as soon as possible.
I would be happy to, but wouldn't that mean that I would loose access to all the Visual Studio tooling for making content types, list definitions, workflows etc.? This is actually my biggest concern so far, as going backwards to a plain text editor sounds scary especially given the amount of cross-dependencies and the complexity of CAML (not even mentioning workflows which I've always designed only visually).
I understand there's an XSD schema for the provisioning file itself that I can use for validation, but it won't help me much with all the CAML, elements.xml etc.
Aug 09 2018 10:38 AM
Aug 09 2018 01:29 PM
Feb 06 2019 09:16 AM
Hi @Joel Rodrigues and @Steve Johnson ,
In retrospective, you both are totally right. We are using PnP for our current internal SharePoint project, and I have also started using PnP for applying updates to an originally SharePoint Designer-authored web, which turned out to work quite good.
As for workflows, we've found a way to design them in Visual Studio and then compile into a form that could be provisioned via PnP.
Thanks a lot for the inspiration!