Sharepoint 2013 app development queries

Question

I'd like to discuss about some sharepoint 2013 development experiences and require your guidance for further support.

We've a requirement to develop SP 2013 sharepoint hosted apps and provision all elements like Site Columns, Content types, Lists and workflows, branding elements like CSS, images and master pages etc.

Now, when the end user login to the portal, basically he will be redirected to host web. Then end user click our app icon to launch our components.

But the requirement is, when the end user logs into the portal, he should be redirected automatically to our app web. But it is not a right approach to redirect to app web directly as mentioned by Microsoft.

They've suggested to use Client App Parts to display the list. But in that case, we need to write some CSOM to interact with app web from host web. So to avoid CSOM, is there is any way to build this functionality or do you have any solution approach?

Answer 1

If you're writing Apps, CSOM and REST are the APIs you'll have to use... Apps cannot interact with your SharePoint installation using the Server Side Object Model. In fact, if you're going with the SharePoint Hosted App model your only choice is to use the JavaScript flavor of the CSOM.

It is not possible to directly use the solution framework to load XML definitions for site columns, master pages, CSS files, JS files, or any other assets from within an App into the Host web. You could declaratively load components in your app web, but you would need programmatically load things into the host web using a version of the CSOM/REST API.