“Something interesting” Sample app – Coding – Part 4 – Summary

This post shows how to code the sample application shown on this blog. This continues part 3 of this coding series.

In this series, I tried to show how you can play with multiple technologies to achieve your goal. In this case, this “app” uses the following SharePoint 2010 technologies:

1. Excel Web Services: Because the EWA JavaScript OM does not support saving of workbook copies, we needed to use this API to save the workbook.

2. Excel Web Access (EWA) JavaScript OM: We used this to figure out what the user who publishes is looking at and to select that region when other users open up the “interesting” link.

3. SharePoint 2010 REST List APIs: ListData.svc is a powerful new mechanism in SharePoint 2010 that you can use to browse and updated the various lists (Document Libraries, list of links etc).

4. EWA: To show the workbook and allow users to interact with it.

I also wanted to spend some time on what’s missing, or what could be done better in the app. Obviously, when writing samples (and when you are as lazy as me), corners get cut:

1. There is virtually no error handling or even checking in the code.

2. Instead of passing the actual title in the link, it would have been better to pass the list-item ID and use that with another REST request to get the data from SharePoint (that way, you can also fill in the notes in the text-box area).

3. The visuals could be made to look a little less appalling by somebody with even meager skills in HTML.