Change is good. Being prepared for change is even better. Recently, I put out a poll online to see whether or not developers have adopted the SharePoint Framework yet. Many responses for not adopting SPFx included that the new development pattern requires a complete new toolchain for development. This is true, but I recommend trying to crawl before taking your first step.

It's been a big year for Office365 and SharePoint. If you are a developer, you have likely seen all of the news around the SharePoint Framework. Currently, we have access to:

• Webparts
• Field Customizers
• Application Customizers
• Command Sets

This new framework is a modern take on the old SharePoint development models and gives you the ability to customize the new "Modern UI" for Office 365. SharePoint 2016 On-premise will receive the SharePoint Framework in Feature Pack 2. Now this is all great, but one of the questions I always see is: 

"Is it too early to look at the SharePoint Framework?"

Welcome back to another series of "beau experiments with SharePoint Field Customizers". If you saw my last post you'd see that I have been experimenting with SharePoint Framework Field Customizers (in preview). In this tutorial I wanted to augment the OOTB person field by rendering more relevant content about the user specified on the list item.

Here is the end result of this tutorial.

I swear, exploration always gets the best of me. I've been using the SharePoint Framework for some time now and I always try to figure out cool things I can build with it. I've been really enjoying figuring out how I can replace existing JSLink implementations with the new SharePoint Extension framework.

Field Customizers are the latest and greatest feature to be provide within the new SharePoint Framework. If you are like me, you immediately opened up command prompt and VS Code, grabbed the new Yeoman template and started testing them out!

The logical starting place would be going to the MS Docs for SPFx Field Customizers. If you go through the tutorial, it's pretty straight forward. However, unlike SPFx webparts, you cannot debug these field customizers locally. You actually have to create a site and pass a url similar to this.

contoso.sharepoint.com/Lists/Orders/AllItems.aspx?loadSPFX=true&debugManifestsFile=https://localhost:4321/temp/manifests.js&fieldCustomizers={"Percent":{"id":"0e3d8b71-56aa-4405-9225-f08a80fc1d71","properties":{"sampleText":"Hello!"}}}

You'll notice a couple parameters. The first being loadSPFX=true, this is because the SharePoint framework isn't loaded by default. The second is a location to your localhost manifest.js file which is running on your local machine when you use gulp serve --nobrowser.

Now, you are so excited you breeze through the Microsoft Docs but there is one thing you notice... it says

"Append the following query string parameters to the URL. Notice that you will need to update the id to match your own extension identifier available from the HelloWorldFieldCustomizer.manifest.json file:

Navigate to your manifest.json file and grab the ID and pass it in your query string parameters where it says fieldCustomizers=...., and replace the ID with the ID from your manifest file.

In a previous post I wrote, I showed you how to update a taxonomy field using REST even when Microsoft says you must use the CSOM/JSOM to update these fields! Well I can't take "No" for an answer...

As a front-end developer I much prefer working with native JSON and using REST. I find the SharePoint Client Object Model (JSOM) to be a bit clunky and complicated to use. Recently I was working on a project where I had a custom form and I needed to update a Managed Metadata Field on a new document that was being uploaded. Everywhere you look on the web says... "Microsoft does not support updating Taxonomy Fields using REST". -- and while this is completely true from Microsofts point of view, there is a way you can use REST to update a Taxonomy Field. Caveat - This only works with single value Managed Metadata fields. You cannot use this method to update Multi-Value Managed Metadata fields, however you can use this one.

Lets assume I already uploaded a file in a previous method call and then I used REST to retrieve that file, to then update the Metadata (as you cannot update Metadata in the upload REST call). 

One of the many questions I've seen on SharePoint forums is "How do I customize OOB SharePoint list forms when created in a SharePoint App?." Outside of the SharePoint App Model, customizing OOB list forms is easy! You just open up SharePoint Designer, go the list and copy the DispForm and start modiyfing!