I’ve been playing with SharePoint Online 365 (2013) and NAPA for a few days now. Deployed a simple AppPart.. great potential in this. We have a big SP 2007 Farm with about 200 Site Collections. About 20 of those site collections have web part pages with customized (HTML, XSLT, CAML, C# Blocks, jQuery blocks and even SQL controls) List forms, DataView Webparts. We’d like to port all these sites to SPO. Having looked at SPD 2013 it appears we have lost Design view. Looking at SPO, It does not appear there is an easy way to create webpart pages with a List Newform or editable XSLT List View either. Also, we don’t like or plan to use Infopath for forms.
So given all this. I was wondering if jQuery and the SP object model thru NAPA can help us here? I’d really the idea of making all these pages/sites/solutions work on the SPO Cloud. And beyond challenges with On-Prem data sources we can address with BCS, WCF and oAuth. I think we can do it.. but was wondering if it would be a good idea to try to develope AppParts to hanlde List form new, edit and display functions just so we can control form look and behavior changes we previously code around right in the aspx.page. Also, wonder if we can develop the AppPart smart and dynamic enough to respond to setting changes in the SP list, like columns, column order, Column name, Choice entries. And is this even the right approach? Maybe the AppPart can somehow bring in the List controls and work around them? Maybe it’s still easier to create a copy of newform or the view page and use a code block to do things to the prebuild List AppPart? Not sure.. very green on all this. But it would be huge to be able to port all this to NAPA only SP Apps!
One other benefit to NAPA and a Web based IDE for me is that I don’t like heavy heat spewing laptops, I use $250 Chromebook and RDP into my powerful desktop for everything. The idea that I can develop (at least 90%) right on the cloud with nothing on my client but a browser would be huge!
