Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Graph, 6 Jun 2023

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From YouTube: Scenarios and features of Microsoft Syntex Repository Services

Description

In this 17-minute developer focused demo, Marc Windle reviews scenarios and features of Syntex Repository Services - the containers and APIs that make it work. Review Repository Services application structure – Containers and Drive Objects in Microsoft Graph. Address permissions, custom properties, sensitivity labels, Office and video player support. Live demo using Postman to call Graph using new Repository Services APIs. Create container, add item (document/video), preview. How Repository Services differ from SharePoint site storage.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on June 6, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Marc Windle (Microsoft)

Supporting materials
• Article - Introducing Syntex repository services: Microsoft 365 superpowers for your app | aka.ms/syntex/repositorybuild23
• Preview - Register for more details about Microsoft Syntex | aka.ms/repositorypreview
• Demo - Introduction to Microsoft Syntex Repository Services – Marc Windl (May 30th) | https://youtu.be/sjCCdHxf8Vk?t=770

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home

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I'm, a product manager at Microsoft, working on syntax repository services. Today we're going to go over some of the scenarios and features of syntax repository services and get our hands on the actual apis that make it work.

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So, as Visa mentioned last week, I introduced the product itself, but for those that maybe didn't see that a quick overview here, it is a faster way for developers to build and managed full-featured file and document Centric applications right now.

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It's in private preview I'm not going to explain all those details, but I recommend to go to that link there there's a blog post that explains it in much more detail: AK dot, Ms, syntax, slash repository, build 23, but the real high level overview is that it is a headless API, driven document, focused storage service, it's powered by SharePoint, so you get a whole bunch of superpowers there with built-in security compliance collaboration with office documents and a whole lot more I showed this diagram last week as well.

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It's a real high level overview, basically syntax repository Services lets. You write a custom application that can create containers and those containers store content within an M365 customer they're separate from SharePoint containers or SharePoint sites, OneDrive sites as well, and so those are totally different. You get your own containers that your app gets to create and own and control the experiences of, and all of that is done through graph apis. What I want to do now is show you another diagram, which is a deeper view.

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That kind of gives you a an overview of the anatomy of a syntax repository Services application. So I'll read this kind of top down left to right on the left side, you have a developer tenant or we can also call it a partner tenant. That is where you create your application definition.

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The most important thing there is that you have an Azure active directory, app registration and that container type object, which defines your syntax repository. Services app has an app ID in it billing info and other settings. So then, going on the right side going kind of top down your repository, Services app code actually uses graph apis to create containers within other M365 tenants and I'm, calling it a consuming tenant in there.

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You can create many containers in many different tenants, and so those tenants can be separate and or they can be the same, so you can make a multi-tenant application, creating containers across many different, consuming tenants and controlling the experiences of those and the content within them through your application or, if you're writing an Enterprise line of business app. Those can be the same thing so that diagram would be simplified. The developer, tenant and the consuming tenant would become the same thing. Each container that you create has a container type ID.

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That is really the definition of what app owns it and gets to control the experiences and it points back to that app registration or that definition that I called out before now. The other important takeaway here is that a container is really just a drive in Microsoft graph, so you get an ID with a container and you can treat that as a drive object within Microsoft graph and I'll show you that in the demos later getting into the permissions of a little bit- and this will make more sense once we start calling the apis.

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So in order to call these apis within a consuming tenant, your tenant admin needs to Grant these new permission Scopes within graph. You won't be able to see these yet. These are currently hidden because we're in private preview, but there are two Scopes or a scope and a role that is created, file, storage, container.selected that works with both delegated and application. Only off so you can create delegated calls against uh graph apis for these new apis. That I'll show you or you can use it as app only auth as well.

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Now a container object itself can be uniquely permissioned, and so you can Define security boundaries of containers within your application. There are four roles here: reader writer manager and owner, and you can assign users and groups to each of these roles to control who can access the content via your app in in these containers. One thing to note: container permissions and the drive items within them. They are additive only familiar with SharePoint permissions. This is a slight difference. You can't break inheritance, so you can add permissions and share, but you can't break inheritance within containers.

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So with that I'm going to do one more plug if this product interested, you then sign up for the private preview, there's a link at the bottom. There AKA dot, Ms, slash repository preview or you can hit that QR code and fill up, fill out the form and sign up for private preview, but now I'm going to get into showing you some Hands-On demos, so for this I'm going to open up Postman if you're not familiar with it, it's a great tool for making requests to apis.

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Here, I've got a collection of API requests, called syntax repository, Services I'm, going to open that up- and there are two folders within here- one is delegated. One is application I'm going to show you the delegated folder today and we're going to make our API calls with app and user context.

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So when I click on the delegated, if those familiar with making calls on graph I'm going to get an access token, so using oauth 2 I'm going to use the auth code flow to get an access token I'm, providing a client ID in secret, so I'll click this to get an access token.

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All right, we have our token I will tell a postman to use that on the requests within this folder and I'm going to open up the containers folder. So here are the new apis that come with syntax repository services and the first one that we'll use is create container.

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So here's the endpoint it's on beta right now again, if you would like to use this, you will have to sign up for the private preview using that link that I mentioned before the new endpoint is slash: storage, slash file, storage, slash containers and we'll make a post request to that endpoint with this payload here, I'm just giving it a display, name, a description and then all important container type ID that I mentioned before. So when I send that off, we should have our first syntax repository Services container.

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There you see, we created our first container object, so now I can get the container there uh again. It's just a get request to that same endpoint, I'm, providing a bunch of odata parameters. So we can see some other properties of this object. So you can see here. We've got that container that we just created. There's a custom properties attribute that I'm going to show you a little bit more detail on later, as well as the permissions that I mentioned in the slide, because I created this container with delegated auth.

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It automatically assigns the user context there to be an owner of that container. In this case, I'm signed with the administrator account on my tenant, so now I'm going to show you how we can add permissions to this new container object. So we hit the slash permissions endpoint on that container and I'm, going to assign Megan b as a reader on this container.

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I'll send that off and you can see Megan has been added as a reader on here and I'm, actually going to update that permission, because I would like Megan to be a writer instead.

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So I can take that permission, ID that I just created and change the role from reader to writer I'll send that off and when it completes Megan Bowen is now a writer on that container and as I mentioned in the slides, you can add groups as uh members of these permission roles so I will add the Retail Group to be a reader on this container as well. I'll send that request off and there we go anybody. That's part of the retail members group can now see content in this container.

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I mentioned custom properties, so I'll show you what those look like you can set, what are effectively key value pairs on containers, and it looks like my oh- that was getting custom property. Sorry I'm going to actually set custom properties in here. So this request: here's the payload, you can just do slash, custom properties and patch that I've added three here you can add many key value pairs.

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The key is URL path, for example, but that can be any string that you want and then the value here is Northwind. So one other attribute that you get to. There are two types, so you can make them searchable or not so here, I've got three custom properties that I'm going to set I'll send those off, and now we've got some custom properties on our new container. So when I go back and get that container object, you can see, we've got a bunch more data in there.

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There are the custom properties that we've set, and here are all of the permissions. So you can see the admin is the owner of that container. The retail members group is the reader and Megan Bowen is a writer on that container. So those are that's a quick tour of some of the container API endpoints, but as I mentioned, containers are really just drives and graphed, and so this container ID that you get you can treat that as a drive, ID and graph, and so I'm going to close the containers.

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Folder open up this new files folder here and show you some of the existing graph apis that you might be familiar with to interact with this container as a drive object, so I pass that container ID and now I'm, using the existing 1.0 graph endpoint to get that container as a drive object. So you might be familiar with that. You can get Drive items on that container. I'll. Send that request off.

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You might be familiar with that one as well, and this one is just going to get an empty set, because this is a brand new container and we haven't created any Drive items in it, so I'm going to upload a file. The first thing I'm going to do is upload a PDF file in here. I've got this add slogans. Pdf document we'll see that similar document as a Word document later and there we go- we've got our first dry item in this container.

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Can I actually show you a cool feature? That's built in to syntax repository Services containers I'm going to get a preview link on this container.

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I can do that by hitting the slash preview endpoint on that drive item I, don't need to pass any parameters so I'll send that request off, and we have a preview link here if I go over here and grab that link I'm just going to copy it to my clipboard open up a browser you can see that built in when this renders you have the ability to preview PDFs right out of the box, with content stored in syntax repository, Services containers now I'm going to upload a video file as well. This might take a second.

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This file is a little bit larger and this will upload this sample.mp4 video into this container and assuming that works. It does take a couple of seconds because the video file is a little bit larger. I should be able to again create a preview link with that file that I just uploaded and we can render and watch video files directly from a syntax repository Services container with a built-in player. So there we go. We have our file I'm, going to generate another preview link with that new file.

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There we go I'll copy that new preview link URL into my clipboard open up a new browser, tab paste it and you can see built-in you've got video support streaming right out of the box with syntax repository Services containers.

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So that's pretty cool I'm going to go back now and show you a little bit of the office support, so I'll upload an Excel file in here once this request loads. Let me just close that video window because it seems to be taking up some of my memory. I'll go back here.

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So we've got this Amplified pricing, Excel document I'm going to send that off load a file and again we've got a new file in there. You can use the web URL property of that drive. Item object, I'm going to go in here and make a new browser tab paste that in here and right out of the box, you have office online support. You can view edit and co-author documents with office online right out of the box with those files stored in syntax repository, Services containers. So I'll do the same thing with the PowerPoint file.

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Let that tab open up in Postman, I'll upload this PowerPoint document send that request off grab the web URL.

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Open up a new browser tab for that paste it and we should see a rendering of this PowerPoint file again. This is open for view edit and cloth, so we can co-author it as well. I can share it.

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Other folks, within this tenancy or even externally- and we can all collaborate on that document right there I'll upload a word file open up that tab in Postman. Here's a word file I'll send that request off upload a Word document grab the web URL property here again.

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Open up a new browser, tab paste that, and now we have the word office online experience as well. So once this renders I'm going to show you a couple more cool things right from within here. So I've got this ad slogans document I'm going to actually show you how you can comment in here so I'm going to add a new comment, I'm going to say at Nestor.

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And we can people pick I can uh mention somebody in here and say: can you please review and then I will send that off and if this document is not shared with Nestor, it's going to give me the share and notify experience, and so even though I haven't shared this document with Nestor I can grant access directly from in there and so you'll get at mentions, commenting share and notify. Nestor is going to get an email there.

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You can click on that link, click and open up this document within office online and share a notify red as well. Another cool thing that you can do is you're consuming tenant can set up sensitivity. Labels I've already created one within this consuming tenant and called Project Blue. So you can apply sensitivity.

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Labels in here so I'm going to apply that Project Blue sensitivity label to this document, and with that you can get additional protections and things like that with existing sensitivity, label capabilities like encryption and other capabilities that sensitivity labels offers there's a lot more features than that. So there's e-discovery and audit support, so your consuming tenant can e-discover content within here. Create e-discovery cases and do search queries as well, and they can audit the contents like file, access or updates, and things like that. So that's it for me.

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Thank you very much for the time and again hit that link to learn more, that I showed on the slides, I'll paste them in the chat as well or and and hit that link to sign up for the private preview as well. Thank you for the time and if there's any questions hit the chat and.

B

I'll be excellent. Thank you. Mark before you stop, sharing, don't do that yet just want to have a one question or one clarification, and you can say yes or no, so so based there's a lot of questions related okay. How is this different than manipulating files in the SharePoint? What is the advantage of doing this and all of that?

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The key here and Mark correct me if I'm wrong just to Reef, let's say phrasing, what we're saying, rather than storing the files, for example in Azure, you want to store the files in a customer antenna, so you can actually align on the compliance and security and the file will never leave the customer tenant. Also, the difference than uploading the files to a SharePoint site is that you are in a application: specific storage, not in a SharePoint site, specific storage which would get complicated on. How would you who has access on that site?

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How do you deal with those permissions? Everything else consider this as a tenant, scoped, storage per application and then based on application requirements. You can adjust the things good way of telling that just to recap.

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Exactly and another key difference is, this: is consumption.

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As well, yes, consumption paste good point. Absolutely now the pricing everything else there's a lot of questions on that. One I think we'll publish more on those details later on, or we can reference that, but I think that's it for this one.

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