Tag / mvc

by Simon Doy

Dev Diary S01E06: Azure MVC Web API, Angular and Adal.JS and 401s


Introduction

In my previous post, we discussed how to implement Adal.JS into your Angular application. This allows us to use Azure Active Directory as our authentication mechanism.

In this post I am going to go through and create the MVC Web API which we will then start to call from our Angular client to manipulate the Invoices.

 

Creating the MVC Web API Project

Right then, so first of all we need to create an MVC Web API Project. There are lots of guides out there such as this one on the ASP.NET site.

Anyway, I fired up Visual Studio 2015.

  • File->New Project
  • Chose the Visual C# ASP.NET Web Application template
  • Created an MVC 4.5.2 template Web Application

image

  • Selected the folders and core reference for MVC and Web API
  • Selected to “Host in the cloud”
  • Then clicked Change Authentication
    • Clicked on Word and School Accounts
    • Choose Single organisation and selected my domain ithinksharepoint.com
    • Also selected Read Directory data option

image

  • Now click Ok
  • Clicked Ok to start creating the project

Next, you are presented with a screen to start configuring your App Service.

So I setup an appropriate name for the Web App

  • appropriate Web App Name
  • Choose my subscription
  • Chose Resource Group
  • Chose App Service Plan
  • Clicked Create

Visual Studio then worked its magic and created the Project with all the Azure services behind the scenes.

Then it setup the Organizational Account and App Insights. Once this was all completed we have a working Azure Web Application and are ready to start adding the Web API components.

 

Configuring Azure AD Authentication for the WebAPI Application

To be honest I was a bit surprised that I had to do this next step but when I was trying to find the application in Azure AD, I could not find anything. Also I could not find anything in the project either related to Azure AD.

So to configure Azure AD Authentication for the WebAPI application I had to do the following:

  • Right-click on the project
  • Choose “Configure Azure AD Authentication”

This fires up the Azure AD Authentication wizard

  • Click Next
  • Under Single-Sign-On
    • Choose your domain
    • Provide an appropriate App ID Uri.
    • Choose create a new Azure AD Application
    • Click Next
  • Under Directory Access Permission
    • Select Read Directory Access is not already enabled
    • Click Finish

This will start a wizard which will set everything up. The end result is visible in https://manage.windowsazure.com

 

 

Adding the WebAPI Components

We have a .NET MVC WebAPI project with very little in it.

Let me explain what I did next, so I would like to have two services for the first phase.

  • Configuration Controller – used to get the system and user configuration for the application.
  • Invoice Controller – used to add, edit, remove and list the invoices found in the application.

What we will do is create the Configuration service with a simple stub, firstly with no authentication so that we make sure it works and then we will make changes to the WebAPI layer so that it requires authentication.

 

I created the Configuration Controller. This was achieved by the followingNyah-Nyah

  • Browsed to the Controllers folder
  • right-clicked Add->Web->Web API->Web API 2.1
    • ConfigurationController.cs
  • Modified the initial code so that it looked like this
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Web.Http;
namespace Itsp365.InvoiceFormApp.Api.Api.Controllers
{
public class ConfigurationController : ApiController
{
public IDictionary<string,string> Get()
{
var configuration = new Dictionary<string, string>();
configuration.Add("SharePointUrl", "https://ithinksharepointltd.sharepoint.com/sites/dev&quot;);
return configuration;
}
}
}
view raw ConfigurationController.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Next, we need to deploy this code to Azure and try it out.

I published the project to Azure by doing the following:

  • Right-click on the project –> Publish

image

  • Next choose Publish from the wizard

This will start the publishing process and push the code up into Azure.
Oh dear, this did not go so well and I received the following screen:

image

I ended up having to switch on customErrors as recommended by the error message. It turned out that there was a reference to the System.Spacial.dll. The project did not need this and removed it from the project references. The site was published and then ended up with the following screen.

image

I accepted the request for permissions and then was redirected to http://localhost which failed to work as I was not debugging the application.

Third time lucky, this time I ran the project using F5 and it all worked nicely, redirecting to http://localhost.

Just in case you do not believe me, I took the screenshot below:

image

 

We can also see that our API is working by browsing to https://localhost:44356/api/configuration and we receive a block of Xml as shown below.

image

Ok, now that we have the service up in the cloud, lets update Angular to consume it.

 

Update Angular client application to consume WebApi

So I thought I would update the Angular application, add a new page for settings. Firstly, the page would just load in the configuration but eventually this page will allow users to setup and configure the settings for the application.

In order to be able to consume the configuration api endpoint, I needed to do a couple of things to the application.

  • create a new view called settings.html
  • create a new service called configurationService.js
  • create a new controller called settingsController.js
  • configure the app.js to load these new modules
  • configure the index.html to load the scripts

So lets go through each of the components, starting with the settings.html page

<section>
<h1> Settings </h1>
<h2> Login Information </h2>
<p class="form-control">
Username: {{userInfo.userName}}
</p>
<p class="form-control">
Profile: <br/>
<ul>
<li ng-repeat="profileItem in userInfo.profile">{{profileItem}}</li>
</ul>
</p>
</section>
<section>
<h2>Api Settings</h2>
<p>
{{apiConfig}}
</p>
</section>
<section>
<h2>Application Information</h2>
<p>
{{applicationInformation}}
</p>
</section>
<section>
<h2>Additional Settings</h2>
</section>
<section>
<h2>Installation Information</h2>
<a class="btn" href="#/installation" title="Show Installation Information">Installation Status</a>
</section>
view raw settings.html hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Next, we have the settingsController.js

'use strict';
var settingsControllerModule = angular.module('settingsController', ['configurationServiceModule']);
settingsControllerModule.controller('settingsController', ['$scope','$http','$routeParams','configurationService','adalAuthenticationService', function ($scope, $http, $routeParams, configurationService, adalService) {
$scope.userInfo = adalService.userInfo;
$scope.apiConfig={};
$http({
method:'GET',
url: configurationService.settings.apiUrl + "/configuration"
}).then(function processConfigurationResponse(response){
$scope.apiConfig=response.data;
}, function processError(response){
alert(response);
});
}]);
view raw settingsController.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Lastly, we have the configurationService

'use strict'
var configurationService = angular.module('configurationServiceModule', []);
configurationService.constant('applicationConstants', {
'clientId':'7c27b6a6-{4 digits}-{4 digits}-9b92-2eee2264cc71',
'tenantName':'{domain}.com',
'instance':'https://login.microsoftonline.com/&#39;,
'endPoints': {},
'apiUrl':'https://{url}.azurewebsites.net'
});
configurationService.service('configurationService',[]);
configurationService.provider('configurationService', function configurationServiceProvider(){
this.endPoints=null;
this.clientId=null;
this.apiUrl=null;
this.tenantName=null;
this.hasInternetConnection=function(){
return true;
}
this.init=function(apiUrl, tenantName, clientId, endPoints)
{
this.apiUrl=apiUrl;
this.tenantName=tenantName;
this.clientId=clientId
this.endPoints=endPoints;
}
this.load=function(){
var promise = $q.defer();
};
this.$get = [function initialiseConfigurationService(){
var configurationServiceInstance=new configurationSettings();
configurationServiceInstance.settings.apiUrl=this.apiUrl;
configurationServiceInstance.settings.adalSettings.clientId=this.clientId;
configurationServiceInstance.settings.adalSettings.tenant=this.tenantName;
configurationServiceInstance.settings.adalSettings.endPoints=this.endPoints;
return configurationServiceInstance;
}];
});
function configurationSettings()
{
this.settings={};
this.settings.siteUrl="";
this.settings.apiUrl="";
this.settings.logoUrl="https://blog.ithinksharepoint.com/logo.png&quot;;
this.settings.adalSettings={};
this.settings.adalSettings.instance="";
this.settings.adalSettings.tenant="";
this.settings.adalSettings.clientId="";
this.settings.adalSettings.applicationId="";
this.settings.adalSettings.endPoints="";
this.vatRate=20;
this.currency="£";
this.unitTypes = [
{name: 'once'},
{name: 'hour'},
{name: 'day'}
];
};
view raw configurationService.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

We have the guts of the changes required, of course we need to link these pages into the application.

So the app.js needs to be updated with the new route for the settings page. Also we need to setup the configurationService.

'use strict';
var invoiceFormApp = angular.module('itspInvoiceFormApp',
[
'ngRoute', 'invoiceControllersModule', 'dataModelService', 'AdalAngular', 'configurationServiceModule', 'settingsController'
]);
var appStart = function($routeProvider, $httpProvider, adalProvider, applicationConstants, configurationServiceProvider) {
$routeProvider.when('/invoices/add', {
templateUrl:'/app/views/add-invoice.html',
controller: 'addInvoiceController',
requireADLogin: true
}).when('/invoices', {
templateUrl:'/app/views/list-invoices.html',
controller: 'listInvoicesController',
requireADLogin: false
}).when('/settings', {
templateUrl:'/app/views/settings.html',
controller: 'settingsController',
requireADLogin: true
}).otherwise({
redirectTo: '/invoices'
});
var instance=applicationConstants.instance;
var clientId=applicationConstants.clientId;
var tenantName=applicationConstants.tenantName;
var endPoints=applicationConstants.endPoints;
var apiUrl = applicationConstants.apiUrl;
configurationServiceProvider.init(apiUrl, tenantName, clientId, endPoints);
adalProvider.init({
instance: instance,
tenant: tenantName,
clientId: clientId,
endPoints: endPoints,
anonymousEndpoints:{},
extraQueryParameter: 'nux=1',
cacheLocation: 'localStorage', // enable this for IE, as sessionStorage does not work for localhost.
}, $httpProvider);
};
invoiceFormApp.config(['$routeProvider', '$httpProvider', 'adalAuthenticationServiceProvider', 'applicationConstants', 'configurationServiceProvider', appStart]);
view raw app,js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Also the index.html needed to be updated so that we have a link for the settings page.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en" ng-app="itspInvoiceFormApp">
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>iThink SharePoint Invoice System</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/bower_components/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/app/css/invoiceformapp.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div>
<nav class="navbar navbar-default">
<div class="container-fluid">
<ul class="nav navbar-nav">
<li><a class="btn primary" href="#">Home</a></li>
<li><a class="btn primary" href="#/invoices/add" title="Create Invoice">New Invoice</a></li>
<li><a class="btn primary" href="#/settings" title="Settings">Settings</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</nav>
</div>
<div ng-view></div>
</body>
<script src="/bower_components/angular/angular.js"></script>
<script src="/bower_components/angular-route/angular-route.js"></script>
<script src="/bower_components/angular-resource/angular-resource.js"></script>
<script src="/bower_components/jquery/dist/jquery.js"></script>
<script src="/bower_components/bootstrap/dist/js/bootstrap.js"></script>
<script src="/bower_components/adal-angular/dist/adal.min.js"></script>
<script src="/bower_components/adal-angular/dist/adal-angular.min.js"></script>
<script src="/app/controllers/invoiceControllers.js"></script>
<script src="/app/controllers/settingsController.js"></script>
<script src="/app/services/dataModelService.js"></script>
<script src="/app/services/configurationService.js"></script>
<script src="/app/app.js"></script>
</html>
view raw index.html hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Phew, that is quite a big change, so lets go and try this out.

image

I browse to the application and click on the settings button.

 

Unfortunately, I get an error and looking into the browser developer tools we see the following message:

XMLHttpRequest cannot load https://itsp365invoiceformappapitest.azurewebsites.net/configuration. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://localhost:8080' is therefore not allowed access. The response had HTTP status code 404.

 

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) issues

So, what is going on?

Well we haven’t allowed the API to be able to process requests from domains that isn’t its own. The way we do that is through CORS configuration within the WebAPI.

To get this to work we need to configure the WebAPI by

  • Installing the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Cors NuGet Package (current v5.2.3)
    • Not the Microsoft.AspNet.Cors NuGet Package (this does not give you the assembly System.Web.Http.Cors).
  • Modify /App_Start/WebApiConfig.cs
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web.Http;
using System.Web.Cors;
using System.Web.Http.Cors;
namespace Itsp365.InvoiceFormApp.Api
{
public static class WebApiConfig
{
public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
{
// Web API configuration and services
var corsConfiguration = new EnableCorsAttribute("http://localhost:8080,http://127.0.0.1:8080,https://itsp365invoiceformappapitest.azurewebsites.net&quot;, "*", "*");
config.EnableCors(corsConfiguration);
// Web API routes
config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes();
config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
name: "DefaultApi",
routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);
}
}
}
view raw WebApiConfig.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now,its able to call in and get the configuration settings correctly!

image

 

Switching on Adal.js

We have proven that we can talk to our MVC Web API endpoint. So that is good news but now I had to get it to authenticate through Azure AD, get a access token and use that when making requests to the API.

Fortunately, Adal.js comes to the rescue here and a lot of the heavy lifting is done for you!

So let’s have a look at this. This bit did take me a while and I will explain why a little later. Though the following people and posts really helped me get to understand how Adal.js handles authentication when  authenticating against different endpoints.

First, we need to tell Adal.Js about the endpoints that will require authentication and we need to provide a way to map those endpoint URLs to resource name.

So to do that we configure the endPoints object when setting initialising the Adal library. Currently this is being setup by the following code snippet in app.js :-

 

var instance=applicationConstants.instance;
var clientId=applicationConstants.clientId;
var tenantName=applicationConstants.tenantName;
var endPoints={'https://{myurl}.azurewebsites.net/api':'https://{myappuri}.com'};
var apiUrl = applicationConstants.apiUrl;
configurationServiceProvider.init(apiUrl, tenantName, clientId, endPoints);
adalProvider.init({
instance: instance,
tenant: tenantName,
clientId: clientId,
endPoints: endPoints,
anonymousEndpoints:{},
extraQueryParameter: 'nux=1',
cacheLocation: 'localStorage', // enable this for IE, as sessionStorage does not work for localhost.
}, $httpProvider);
view raw snippet-app.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

The important part of this is the endPoint array object. This is an array of objects where you have the URL associated to the application Id Uri.

If you remember that is this section of the application configuration in Azure Ad.

 

Once we have that value we need to associate the APi Url to the App Uri Id.

This allows Adal.JS to provide the right resource id when requesting an auth token.

 

Turn on Authentication in our Web API layer

So now we have Angular configured to authenticate against Web API with Adal.js. We just need to switch on authentication for the Web API layer.

This is pretty straightforward and requires the addition of the [Authorize] attribute to our Web API Class or Methods. The change is shown below:

 

A recompile of code and Publish now allows us to test the changes out.

 

HTTP 401s and Debugging Azure WebApps

So I thought I had everything setup to allow the Angular application to authenticate against the Web API. Unfortunately I was seeing 401 Unauthorised when using the browser’s development tools.

image

 

After quite a lot of trying things out, I was stumped so I tried out debugging the WebAPI code running on Azure. Fortunately, Azure has some pretty cool development debugging tools.

To start debugging the API, I had to fire up Server Explorer. Apparently you should be able to use Cloud Explorer in Visual Studio 2015 but I have not been able to get this to work.

To debug your application do the following:

  • View->Server Explorer
  • Expand the Azure node in Server Explorer
  • Expand the App Service node in Server Explorer
  • Expand the resource group
  • Right click on the App and choose “Attach debugger”

image

The debugger takes a few moments to organise itself but eventually it will attach.

Now we can setup our breakpoints and start debugging the application. I put a breakpoint in the startup.cs file on the ConfigureAuth(app)  line within the Configuration function.

Even when I had the debugger running and tried to access the application, at no time did the breakpoint get picked up.

So what is going on?

I looked at the Azure configuration for the API application and made the following changes:-

  • Added a reply url for the Angular application which is currently being run using http://localhost:8080
  • Added an application permission so that the application can read directory data

This had no effect and I was still getting the error.

 

Examining the Angular Azure AD Application Configuration

Next I thought I better make sure that Angular is sending over an authentication token when making the request to Azure. For more information, watch this brilliant video on OAuth: Deep Dive into the Office 365 App Model: Deep Dive into Security and OAuth in Apps for SharePoint

 

I used the browser development tools and set a breakpoint in the settingsController.js on line 14 which is where the error is processed.

image

When the breakpoint is reached then we could look at the response object, fortunately the response object is pretty detailed and it has a config object which provides information about what was sent with the request. We can see here that there is a header object, now this should have an Authentication header with a Bearer token. There is not one, so what is going on? It must be our Adal Angular configuration.

 

Immediately when I saw this, I thought ah maybe its our endPoint configuration. There is a function as part of the Adal Angular service object, in our code that is adalService. This function is called getResourceForEndPoint(), this function will return back the App Id Uri based on a provided URL. Now interestingly, when this function was called with the following argument:

  • adalService.getResourceForEndPoint(“https://itsp365invoiceformappapitest.azurewebsites.net/api”);

This function returned null. This is very strange as our endPoints are configured. After a lot of playing about I realised my error. The configuration of the adalService is performed in app.js.

adalProvider.init({
instance: instance,
tenant: tenantName,
clientId: clientId,
endPoints: endPoints,
anonymousEndpoints:{},
extraQueryParameter: 'nux=1',
cacheLocation: 'localStorage', // enable this for IE, as sessionStorage does not work for localhost.
}, $httpProvider);
view raw broken adalProvider app.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The problem was the object name given for endPoints. The object name should be endpoints. So the updated app.js  was changed to the following:

adalProvider.init({
instance: instance,
tenant: tenantName,
clientId: clientId,
endpoints: endPoints,
anonymousEndpoints:{},
extraQueryParameter: 'nux=1',
cacheLocation: 'localStorage', // enable this for IE, as sessionStorage does not work for localhost.
}, $httpProvider);
view raw adal app.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Now that we have this change made, I tried to login but got the error that the application could not reply back to the URL http://localhost:8080/app/

The fix was made to the Azure Application for the Angular client app, itsp365.invoiceformapp.client, by adding http://localhost:8080/app to the list of Reply URLs.

image

 

Whilst looking at this page, I realised that the client Angular application did not have any permissions to access the API Azure application. So to fix this, I added a new permission, chose the application:

image

Once this was added then the delegated permissions to access the application was given.

If we had not set this permission we would have seen the following error when trying to access the API application.

“response = “AADSTS65001: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID = ‘{clientid}’”

 

So, actually these two changes really started to make a difference. Now when I accessed the settings view, we received the following error:

“AADSTS70005: response_type ‘token’ is not enabled for the application ↵Trace ID: 2c370e50-63ff-41e1-8cc1-fe90c8ef7b98 ↵Correlation ID: 0d1dd4db-cc4f-4bc1-b7c6-54812dfc3142 ↵Timestamp: 2016-05-14 21:35:39Z”

This requires the application manifest to be modified to enable something called the oAuth2AllowImplicitFlow.

image

 

This setting is changed by browsing to the itsp365.invoiceformapp.client Azure Application:

  • scroll to the bottom, click “Manage Manifest”
  • Click Download Manifest

image

  • Open up the downloaded file, this will have the filename of {clientid}.json, I use VS Code to do this.
  • Find the line below and change the false to true.image[27]
  • Save the file and then back on the Azure Application page choose Manage Manifest and click Upload Manifest

Wait for the manifest to be uploaded and processed.

Now when I made this change I kept getting the error “response_type token is not enabled…”. So I opened up the browsers settings and deleted the site cookies. This deleted the Azure AD authentication cookies and when I next opened up the Angular application I had to login. Now accessing the settings page, it worked!

So if you make changes , either do what I did above or run the browser in incognito mode to force an authentication.

Now the call to the configuration service API was successful!

 

Quick Refactor of the Application Constants

After I did everything, I was not happy with the way that the applicationConstants were part of the configurationService. This does not make sense so I moved them into their own folder and file. A file was created in /app/common/constants.js

The constants.js file had a new module called “applicationConstantsModule” and this defined the constant, applicationConstant.

You can see the code below:

'use strict'
var constantsModule = angular.module('applicationConstantsModule', []);
constantsModule.constant('applicationConstants', {
'clientId':'{clientguidhere}',
'tenantName':'ithinksharepoint.com',
'instance':'https://login.microsoftonline.com/&#39;,
'endpoints': {'https://{apiurlhere}.azurewebsites.net/api':'https://ithinksharepoint.com/Itsp365.InvoiceFormApp.Api.Mark2&#39;},
'apiUrl': 'https://{apiurlhere}.azurewebsites.net/api'
});
view raw constants.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

I then had to update the index.html to load the /app/common/constants.js and also tell the invoiceFormApp to load the module, applicationConstantsModule within the app.js file.

 

With those changes made the refactoring is done.

 

Source Code

The source code for this blog post can be found in the following GitHub repositories:-

Conclusion

So now in this episode we have an application which has a basic REST API which is secured by Azure AD. We have made it possible for the Angular client to be able to authenticate against the REST API endpoint.

I hope you found this useful and there are some good resources for troubleshooting.

 

Next Episode

In the next episode, I will talk about my big mess up where I deleted the Azure AD app by mistake.

Thanks for reading, as always I would be interested in hearing what you think. Are these instructions useful, do they make sense?

 

 

by Simon Doy

Dev Diary S01E02: Angular / WebAPI / Azure Document Db App – Client Environment Setup


Introduction

In my previous post: Dev Diary Entry 1: Azure Web App with MVC WebAPI, Angular and Azure DocumentDb, I introduced the Invoice Management App that I am planning to build.

For complete transparency, the application that I am talking about building has been in development for a week or so now. So, as I write this I am playing catch up. I have been writing down all the problems that I have had and how I resolved them. My aim is that we will quickly get up to date so that I am coding and then I can quickly write about what I did.

Today, we are talking about setting up Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2015 to host my applications. Remember we are building two components, the Angular client application in Visual Studio Code and the MVC Web API component using Visual Studio.

 

Setting up the Environment

Visual Studio Code

Developing in Visual Studio Code is quite different to using Visual Studio, the team at Microsoft are doing a great job at improving the application but it does feel very unfamiliar to me who has been using Visual Studio for a rather long time.

Anyway, I downloaded VS Code from http://code.visualstudio.com/ and installed it on my machine.

I am developing on a Surface Pro 4 with Windows 10 x64. So the instructions provided are for Windows but it is pretty similar for MAC OSX and Linux.

 

Developer Directories

I am developing in the c:\dev folder and have created a subfolder called ITSP and then a subfolder, VSTS. The final directory is c:\dev\itsp\vsts

 

Node and NPM

The next step, was setting up the environment, I had spoken to a few people and read a few posts and the way to go with VS Code was using Node.js tooling and the Node Package Manager, npm.

Node provides a few lightweight services which we can take advantage of when developing. The one that I make most of is the built in HTTP server, but more on that later.

NPM or Node Package Manager provides a fantastic way of downloading, installing and keeping your dependencies up to date. I guess the name came from Redhat’s Package Manager or RPM. To be fair it is also like NuGet which the .NET world have been using to keep their dependencies in check.

So I downloaded and installed Node from https://nodejs.org/en/ and choose the latest build which was v5.6.0, I see that version v6 is out as I write this. The download is an MSI so was a quick simple install.

Next is NPM, so actually NPM comes included with Node.js but I wanted to make sure that I had the latest version of NPM. This is the advice in the NPM Installation instrucitons found here: https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/installing-node

So to do that I started the Node,js command prompt

  • npm install npm –g

The command calls npm telling it to install a package called npm with –g which means to install it so it is available globally.

 

Bower

The other tool that seems to be great at dependency management is Bower. Now, I had a hard time working out what the difference was between Bower and NPM. Why do I need both. Well Bower seems to be better at installing and configuring the client side components and NPM for the server side components.

One of the reasons that I have chosen Bower is to be honest a lot of tutorials use it. Now, this is something that I will look into a little later on the project but I want to get up and running. There do seem to be a lot of alternatives such as Browserify and Webpack.

 

Angular

So this is my first project using Angular, I hear people talking about it all the time! As I was researching into the product more it became embarrassing to see how long its been out before I have had a go at using it!

One of the chaps speaking about this stuff from the SharePoint world is Andrew Connell via his blog. He has a great amount of content which I found really useful.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been reading up on Angular via their documentation pages. I also have been listening to Scott Allen’s AngularJS: Getting Started on Pluralsight.

 

Bootstrap

As a developer, I need help with design so I have decided to use Twitter Bootstrap and fortunately this is quite easy to include in your project.

I am sure that you have used Bootstrap more than me!

However, Bootstrap is a framework which provides a grid based system for defining responsive designs based on having different css classes for different screen sizes.

I have to say I am always amazed what front-end developers can do with Bootstrap, I am sure in time that it will become second nature.

 

Yeoman

Yeoman is like File->New Project in Visual Studio. It is pretty cool actually and allows you to create or use pre existing templates to make the project scaffolding. I did look at this and various templates but I found them complex and they started to pull in a lot of stuff which I did not know about.

So to kept it simple, I haven’t used Yeoman as I wanted to learn how to build the project from scratch rather than have a tool do everything for me and I then don’t understand my dependencies.

I am sure that I will change my behaviour next time once I understand how everything fits together.

Adal.JS

Now I know that I am going to be using Azure Active Directory as my authentication and authorisation mechanism.

ADAL is a library that has been created which provides a wrapper to manage authentication with Azure AD. The library is superb and really straight forward to use for the .NET stack. Fortunately, there is also a JavaScript implementation called Adal.js and even better there is a module created for Angular!

I have been following Adal for a while and the go to guy is Vittorio Bertocci, he has some great posts on all things ADAL.

Introducing ADAL JS v1

The article is great and talks about how to install the framework using Bower and then provides examples including one for authenticating your application with Angular!

 

jQuery

Of course we need jQuery, I don’t think this framework needs any introduction.

This was installed from the node.js command line:

  •  using bower install jquery

 

 

 

Creating the Client Side Visual Studio Code Project

Ok so now I have talked about all the bits and pieces that I am using for the client side of the application, I will try and explain the steps that I took to create the project for Visual Studio Code.

Remember we have two components in this application:-

  • Angular Client side application being developed in Visual Studio Code
  • MVC WebAPI Server side application being developed in Visual Studio 2015

So,  to create the Visual Studio Code project you need to create a package.json file. This is the equivalent of a Visual Studio csproj file for Visual Studio C# Projects. It contains the version number, name of the project, description and also it has scripts section where you can define commands to perform actions when developing your application.

So to get started I did the following:-

  • started node.js command prompt
  • created a directory c:\dev\itsp\vsts\IT365.InvoiceApp.Client
  • from the directory just created I ran npm init
  • this wil start a wizard which then asks for various information about the project including its name, description and author details

Now that we have our package.json created we can fire up Visual Studio Code

  • code .

This will start Visual Studio Code in the current directory which will cause Visual Studio code to read the application information created so far.

 

Install Dependencies

Now we have the project created next it is time to bring in our dependencies.

We will use npm and bower to pull in the dependencies:-

  • bower install bower-angular
  • This will install the Angular component into our project into a folder called bower_components\angular
  • Angular Route
  • bower install bower-angular-route
  • This will allow us to define our routes in the application so that we can control where the user goes, what they see and which controller to use. More on this later
  • Angular Mocks
  • bower install bower-angular-mocks
  • This will allow us to do Test Driven Development when we start looking at Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
  • Angular Sanitizer
  • bower install bower-angular-sanitizer
  • This helps us to strip out dangerous characters from when parsing HTML

 

  • Bootstrap
  • bower install bootstrap
  • This will give us a better look and feel than I could do!

So, we have the Angular and Bootstrap stuff installed that I thought we needed.

 

Next we need to install the ADAL JS stuff

  • ADAL JS
  • bower install angular-adal
  • This will allow us to manage the login / authentication, authorisation process in our application with Azure Active Directory

Then we have jQuery

  • bower install jquery

 

Finally, I want to be able to actually run the application locally and a really nice way of doing that is using the Node.js HTTP Web Server, http-server

  • Node http-server
  • npm http-server –g
  • This will install the http server globally so we can use it in our next applications

 

Create Application Structure

Next I created the application structure

So the following directories and files  were created from within Visual Studio Code

  • [app]
  • [controllers] – this will hold all our controllers
  • [services] – this will hold all our services
  • [entities] – this will hold our JavaScript objects relating to entities such as Invoices, Users etc
  • [views] – this will hold all our views
  • [css] – this will hold our CSS styles
  • [images] – this will hold our image
  • app.js
  • index.html

I am sure that I will be adding more folders etc but that gave me something to start with.

 

Trying out the Application quickly

So one of the tips that I picked up from the node.js documentation was how you can create tasks with NPM.

I was a little confused by this to be honest but after a bit of investigation I found out that I could modify the package.json to configure these tasks for NPM to be able to use.

  • Opening up package.json, i found the scripts section and added the following
  • When i first did this i added just the http server –a 127.0.0.1 –p 8080
  • however, after more reading I realised I could run multiple commands using the && syntax
  • So we ended up with

npm-start-task-config

 

Now this is pretty cool, from the node.js command prompt I can type

  • npm start

This will start a web server and fire up the browser taking me to the homepage!

image

 

Next Episode

So in the next episode, we will actually start develop something. I was pretty excited to try out Angular so I just started to build the application using client side data. So we will cover that.

I hope you can join me for the next episode.