API to work with Viva Connections Dashboard

mgwojciech commented 2 years ago

Describe the feature

Hello, I was thinking about api to help with Viva Dashboard management. What I have in mind is possibility to create the dashboard and manage default adaptive card (stuff like add default card with option to extend the model to custom ACE's).

Is it something You would welcome in the library or should I do it in separate solution?

Describe the solution you'd like

I'm thinking something like could be useful:

VivaDashboardManager manager = new VivaDashboardManager(context); VivaDashboard dashboard = manager.EnsureDashboardExists(); List aces = dashboard.ACEs; dashboad.AddACE(new DefaultACE()); manager.UpdateDashboard(dashboard);

Additional context

jansenbe commented 2 years ago

Hi @mgwojciech ,

Adding support for configuring the Viva connections dashboard is definitely something we should add. The Viva dashboard in reality is a special page type that hosts "ACE web parts" and this means that most of the current page API can work. Below are for example the json properties of a custom ACE on my dashboard:

{
    "id": "b9ff762c-7564-49dd-951d-c33351f7766c",
    "instanceId": "27ace3af-1eae-4b01-bf65-9202388ea34f",
    "title": "XYZ",
    "description": "Calling into an Azure AD secured API",
    "audiences": [],
    "serverProcessedContent": {
        "htmlStrings": {},
        "searchablePlainTexts": {},
        "imageSources": {},
        "links": {}
    },
    "dataVersion": "1.0",
    "properties": {
        "title": "XYZ",
        "description": "Checking licenses...",
        "iconProperty": "https://image.flaticon.com/icons/png/512/747/747055.png",
        "apiAbsUrl": "https://vivaconnections.azurewebsites.net/",
        "appId": "0c72c790-ce9e-422c-a17f-9e6607a0ba58"
    },
    "iconProperty": "https://image.flaticon.com/icons/png/512/747/747055.png",
    "cardSize": "Medium"
}

The main differences between a dashboard page and a regular page are:

PageLayoutType = Dashboard (versus Article or Home for regular pages)
LayoutWebPartsContent = empty (for regular pages the page header is defined in there)
ContentType is different (not really an issue as we're not creating new dashboards, only editing the one that exists)

So what do you think about the following implementation:

Add GetVivaConnectionsDashboard() methods on IWeb
The implementation of this method uses the existing Page API to read and update the dashboard page, but as there are many restrictions on the dashboard page update it's better to return the dashboard as a new type (e.g. VivaConnectionsDashboard) which only exposes the set of cards, methods to add/remove/update cards and a save method.

Above approach should not require too much work as most of the existing page implementation can be reused while still offering a simple VivaConnectionsDashboard type to work with the dashboard.

Let me know what you think, if you want to talk about this then ping me in Teams so we can have a call.

Thanks for wanting to work on this @mgwojciech !

mgwojciech commented 2 years ago

Thanks, Looks like a plan. I'll start this week and reach out if I run into any issues.

jansenbe commented 2 years ago

Thanks a ton for working on this @mgwojciech and apologies merging took so long, but the good news is that your PR has been merged now :-)

pnp / pnpcore