SharePoint Development Models You Should Know About

Today, each software development company is focused on developing cutting-edge solutions that may uplift their expertise by meeting trending approaches. This is where SharePoint development methods hop in.

Microsoft introduced on-premises and online SharePoint approaches in the year 2001. These versions – SharePoint Server & SharePoint Online – offer developers a variety of choices for building custom solutions, which either customize and extend the experience or use data and services within external applications. The popularity of the SharePoint approach has led to the existence of a separate SharePoint development company marketplace in the world of software development.   

And, any SharePoint developer would prioritize the vital factors: goals, needs, infrastructure, architecture,  frameworks, etc., before even jumping to the development process.

After following this approach, it becomes crucial to have in-depth knowledge about different SharePoint models that would help developers build a robust application.

Well, that’s what we have discussed in this blog.

So if you don’t know what SharePoint models are and their purposes in developing a sustainable application, get into the given information.    

What do you mean by SharePoint Development?

SharePoint development allows developers to use custom SharePoint properties to build extended features for their application through custom application development techniques. Its designing and development tools open a wide variety of development options depending on the SharePoint version they are currently using.     

SharePoint Models for Best Development Practices 

Each SharePoint model serves a separate purpose and includes different functionality. That’s why it’s one of the best practices that will help you to know which model to follow before moving on with the development process.

So let’s explore each SharePoint development model step-by-step. 

Online Client-Side JavaScript Injection 

This model offers a customization development option to developers as they can add JavaScript to the content or editor web parts on Publishing Pages to execute with the page rendering. It’s the simplest way to customize any page. 

Injecting JavaScript to the page is directly proportional to its DOM (Document Object Model). It gives the script the flexibility to communicate with all pages and control, Navigation, SharePoint contextual ribbon, and various other parts on the page.

As we all know that JavaScript works on the client-side only; hence, all the customizations you make during development will be executed within a client-side context. This simply indicates that the user’s context is leveraged and rendered in the native page DOM.      

The downside of this SharePoint development approach is that it requires manual configuration on the pages. Plus, self-service sites (team sites, my sites, etc.) contain a development feature called ‘No Script’. Any site pages with ‘NoScript’ enabled will not allow Script Editor and block the script, which is unsafe for scripting.

Technically speaking, these sites will not allow the script editor part from executing on some pages.

SharePoint Development with App/Add-in

This is one of the most flexible Microsoft SharePoint development methods. App or Add-ins are deployed in the App Catalog with a .app public or private file. It allows a SharePoint developer to build an application without executing server-side code on the SharePoint server. As a result, the Add-Ins can be run either in the context of either client browser or on the server. 

Developers can find two versions of SharePoint Add-Ins:

• SharePoint-Hosted: Installed on the SharePoint Website, Host Web, and an isolated sub-site, App Web, is used to host their resources. You can expect SharePoint-Hosted to support only JavaScript, XML, and some ASPX files.
• Provider-Hosted: Contains components situated on another server and installed on Hot Web. Hence, you can run server-side code on a separate server and communicate with SharePoint through CSOM (Client Side Object Model). So you can develop various elements as per the requirement.   

Microsoft introduced the “Future of SharePoint” SharePoint Framework (SPFx) to help the developers even better. This approach is suitable for the forever evolving cloud era. SPFx acquires a set of rules that helps build powerful solutions on Microsoft SharePoint. The best part about this framework is that it can smoothly run on the cloud and is mobile-first. Therefore, it works well with both O365 and SharePoint Online.

Below, we have discussed some properties of SPFx:

• Features can be deployed on modern UI (User Interface) as well as classic pages.
• SPFx contains 100% JavaScript and allows SPFx to be consistent with modern UI as compared to the traditional server-side models.
• SPFx approach offers zero server-side performance issues.
• SPFx supports Iframes.

Variety of SharePoint Solutions Techniques for Developers

SharePoint Solutions is a full-fledged package of pages, code, client-side code, images, and style sheet. These also include SharePoint features – a set of files containing declarative actions to be performed or configured on the target SharePoint ecosystem.

Some changes can be closely scoped, yet some changes require wide addressing, such as scheduling a timer job across SharePoint solutions globally. That’s what makes SharePoint Solutions one of the most interesting development methods.

Generally, SharePoint Solutions come in two versions:

• Farm Solutions
  K.A. Full Trust Solutions are developed on SharePoint server and can help the developers to access the entire server-side SharePoint APIs. Farm solutions are spread as wsp packages and differ in scope: Site Collection, farm, Website or Web Application. These Solutions Event Receivers, Modules, Features, WebParts, Timer Jobs, and much more.  
• Sandbox
  Microsoft introduced another approach – Sandbox Solutions. Sandbox target only site collection, which makes their scope smaller as compared to Farm Solutions. Sandbox Solutions also have access to a tiny server-side API subset.

The best part about Sandbox is that the wsp packages can be deployed to any Solutions Gallery without forcing the server to restart. Unlike Farm Solutions which can break down the entire farm, Sandbox Solutions impacts only on a Site Collection. That’s why Sandbox is considered the best solution for a SharePoint developer to deploy Content Type or assets and Lists.    

Customization Microsoft Framework for SharePoint Developer

As we already introduced ourselves to SharePoint Framework in the “Application Development with App/Add-in” section, we will dig deeper into it in this section.

Developers can practice and implement client-side customization, which is bundled and deployed on SharePoint Sites. These customizations have access to SharePoint through APIs available with the SharePoint Framework. But it doesn’t imply that only SharePoint data will be accessed. Being a client-side solution, it can access other data such as Office Graph, Microsoft Graph, etc. by using any trending technology.

In addition to all the above, SPFx guarantees low development cost and offers better development experience opportunities by adding efficiency and robustness to the applications for both devices and the web. So if you need the perfect customization to you on the client-side, SharePoint Framework is worth testing.     

Conclusion

In this post, we saw a different SharePoint Model, suitable for different application development purposes. We got a thorough insight into the functionality of each model and what makes them different from each other. The SharePoint developers are catered with a wide variety of options such as Add-ins, SharePoint Solutions, and Framework when it comes to building customization, which is to be hosted and deployed on SharePoint. You can use Farm solutions for the entire server-side access or simply choose Sandbox to target a selective site page collection. 

In case you don’t have a sound knowledge of SharePoint development, it’s a great idea to go for professional SharePoint Development Services.