1. Log in to Office 365 Developer Site and navigate to the site collection where you will install an app for SharePoint.
2. Click Site Contents. On the site Contents page click Add an app.
3. On the Your Apps page, in the left navigation bar, click SharePoint Store.
4. On the SharePoint Store page, in the search bar, type business contact and click the search icon. When the Business Contact Manager app appears, click the tile.
5. On the Business Contact Manager page, click ADD IT.
6. On the Confirm that you wish to add the app page, click Continue.
7. On the You just got this app for everyone in your organization page, click Return to site.
8. On the Do you trust Business Contact Manager page, click Trust It. SharePoint adds the app to your site and will refresh the tile when the app is fully added.
9. Click the Business Contact Manager tile to open the app.
10. Click your way around the UI to get a sense for what the app does, but then click the About navigation link and watch the 2:25–minute demo of how to use this app for SharePoint.
11. Click the Back to Site link in the top navigation bar to return to the SharePoint site. You can return to the Business Contact Manager app any time by clicking Site Contents.
12. To build an app for SharePoint using Microsoft Access, open Access 2013.
13. Access opens and displays a number of templates that you can use as a quick start foundation for your app. Notice the difference in the graphics used for the template icons. Any graphic that has the globe on it is a Web App for SharePoint. If you choose the Custom web app template, then you start building your app from scratch. For this exercise, select the Asset tracking template.
14. In the Asset tracking dialog, provide C14AssetTracking for the App Name, skip the Available Locations, and directly enter the full URL to the Office 365 site collection you want to use to build the app.
15. Before you make any changes, click the File tab and click Info. Here you can see the server and database name for the Windows Azure SQL Database that was created for your app. Notice that you can create a client-only database for reporting that will be a read-only connection to the Azure database. You can also manage a variety of other types of connections from the Info page, too, by clicking the Manage button. Return to the Access design page.
16. In the ribbon, click Launch App. Notice how quickly Access Services renders the app. Return to the Access client.
17. In the ribbon, click Navigation Pane; this provides a handy reference to all the Access objects used in your solution.
18. In the ribbon, click Table to get the Add Tables page. You have an array of options for creating a new table. Notice at the bottom of the page these include options such as other Access databases, Excel tables, SharePoint Lists, and more. A significant feature for this release is the Create a new table using our templates search bar at the top. This is backed by a Microsoft-provided Web service that can continuously be updated with new template table structures. The intent is that you don’t need to necessarily do the work of laying out table columns and data types, but you can pull down a table that’s “close” to what you need and then augment it with your own custom columns. Type person in the search bar and click the search icon.
19. Select Vendors from the list. Notice in the Navigation Pane that a new Table was added for Vendors, as well as a Vendors Datasheet and Vendors List.
20. In the Navigation Pane, right-click the Assets Table and select Design View.
21. In the Field Name column, after Owned by, enter Vendor; in the Data Type column enter Lookup.
22. In the Lookup Wizard, select “I want the lookup field to get the values from another table or query.” Select Table: Vendors, select Company from “Which value do you want to display in your lookup?”, leave the remaining default values, and click OK.
23. In the Assets design view, in the Description column, enter Lookup to Vendors table. Close the design view by clicking the “x” on the right side across from the Assets tab. When prompted to save changes, click Yes. Notice on your Assets form that the Vendor lookup field was automatically added.
24. In the ribbon, click Launch App. In the left navigation bar, click Vendors and click the + to add a new vendor. Fill out any data fields you want, but at least enter a Company name because this is the field that you selected to show in the Assets form lookup field. Click the Save icon to save the information and then re-edit it to add an asset to the vendor. (Note that the vendor must be saved before you can associate an asset with it.) At the bottom of the vendor form, click the Add Assets link.
25. In the Assets form you can provide data values, but notice that your Vendor has already been selected. Save the form.
26. You can now explore the UI, and enter Assets using the Assets form or from the Employees form. Return to Access.
27. At this point your solution can only be used by you in the specific site collection where you are building the app. To make this into an app for SharePoint that can be deployed to the corporate app catalog on SharePoint or distributed through the SharePoint Store, click the File tab and click Save As.
28. In the Save As dialog, under File Types, click Save Database As if it is not already selected, and click Save as Package.
29. In the Create New Package from This App dialog, provide a name of C14AssetTracking for the Title and do not include data in the package. When prompted, save the file to a location on your disk.
30. Log in to your Office 365 Developer Portal SharePoint Admin center, click the app’s link and click the App Catalog link.
31. On the App Catalog page, click the Apps for SharePoint link.
32. On the Apps for SharePoint page, click New app and Browse to the file you just saved. Select it, and click Open. Click OK to add the document.
33. In the Apps for SharePoint
C14AssetTracking.app dialog, leave all the defaults and click Save. You can now navigate to any other site collection within your Office 365 tenancy, click Site Contents, click Apps from your Organization, and install your
C14AssetTracking app for SharePoint into that site collection. When you install and run the app it should look something like
Figure 14-4.
In the first part of this Try It Out you navigated to the SharePoint Store, selected an app, and SharePoint installed it into the site collection. But the installed app for SharePoint is available across all the sites in your Office 365 tenancy. So if you navigate to any other site collection and click Site Contents, you will be able to add this app in this site too. Regarding how it works, at the point you clicked the Trust It button, SharePoint began installing the app and automatically provisioned a Windows Azure SQL Database for the app. When the install completed and you clicked the Business Contact Manager tile to view the app, Access Services was invoked. It then rendered the HTML-based UI elements, executed any business logic, and managed the connection and calls to the back-end SQL database.
You then created an app for SharePoint using an existing template as a base. To the base solution you searched via a Microsoft Web service for a template table that you could simply add in to your solution. After selecting a table you wired it up to an existing form and Access did all the work to adjust the UI elements accordingly. You then tested the app for SharePoint by launching it. When the app was complete you generated an app package for distribution through any number of channels you might choose.