Provision multilingual sites with PnP templates

Sharepoint PnP Powershell library (which is also available on Nuget) has own provisioning engine. It is quite powerful engine which allows to provision MUI sites (although it has own problems with stability). In order to do that you need to use several basic elements:

1. Have all literals which should be localized in resx file

2. Specify supported languages inside <pnp:SupportedUILanguages>…</pnp:SupportedUILanguages> section of PnP template. After provisioning these languages will be set in Site settings > Language settings > Alternate languages. You need to have resx file for each supported language in standard resources.xx-XX.resx format

3. Resx files with translations should be specified inside <pnp:Localizations>…</pnp:Localizations> section of PnP template. Note that PnP will provision all these languages to your site regardless of what alternate languages are set in Site settings > Language settings on the moment when this template is applied to target site

4. For localized strings use {resource:ResourceKey} format inside template

Here is example of how PnP template for MUI site provisioning may look like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<pnp:Provisioning xmlns:pnp="http://schemas.dev.office.com/PnP/2018/01/ProvisioningSchema">
  <pnp:Localizations>
 <pnp:Localization LCID="1033" Name="English" ResourceFile="resources.en-US.resx"/>
    <pnp:Localization LCID="1031" Name="German" ResourceFile="resources.de-DE.resx"/>
  </pnp:Localizations>
  <pnp:Templates ID="Test-Container">
    <pnp:ProvisioningTemplate ID="Test" Version="1">

      <pnp:SupportedUILanguages>
        <pnp:SupportedUILanguage LCID="1033" />
        <pnp:SupportedUILanguage LCID="1031" />
      </pnp:SupportedUILanguages>

   <pnp:SiteFields xmlns:pnp="http://schemas.dev.office.com/PnP/2018/01/ProvisioningSchema">
  <Field ID="..." Name="MyField" DisplayName="{resource:MyFieldTitle}" Type="Text" Group="Custom" SourceID="..." StaticName="MyField"></Field>
   </pnp:SiteFields>
   
    </pnp:ProvisioningTemplate>
  </pnp:Templates>
</pnp:Provisioning>

It will provision file with English and German UI languages.

Can’t get groups created from MS Teams from Graph endpoint /beta/me/joinedGroups

With MS Graph API you may use /beta/me/joinedGroups endpoint for getting list of groups where current user is a member. With the same endpoint you may also get isFavorite attribute for the group which shows whether or not user added group to favorites. However this endpoint has own issues: recently we found that it doesn’t return groups which were created from MS Teams: when you create new Team there also related Group is created. It is possible to get details of this group using basic groups endpoint

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/{id}

But if you will try to get list of user’s groups via beta endpoint such groups created from MS Teams won’t be returned:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me/joinedgroups/?$select=id,isfavorite,displayName&$top=200

One possible explanation could be that internally /me/joinedgroups end point is routed to Outlook services which is not integrated with Teams well enough yet: when I tried to add createdDateTime attribute to the REST url (this attribute is returned for groups from basic endpoint - see above)

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me/joinedgroups/?$select=id,isfavorite,displayName,createdDateTime &$top=200

it returned error saying that returned entities have Microsoft.OutlookServices.Group type:

May be this is a bug or such functionality is not implemented in beta endpoint yet. For now I asked this question in StackOverflow – hope that somebody from MS Graph product team will answer it.

Use Sharepoint search API using HTTP POST requests

As you probably know it is possible to use Sharepoint search API programmatically by calling /_api/search/query endpoint with HTTP GET and provide KQL query and details (like selected managed properties) in query string. Popular Search Query Tool uses the same technique. However query string approach has own limitation, e.g. max 4kb length limit which is common for ASP.Net applications. If your query is built dynamically and you don’t know the actual length on compile time you may use search API with HTTP POST and provide KQL query in request body. If you want to use search API with HTTP POST you need to use slightly different endpoint: /_api/search/postquery. Let’s see how it works in Postman tool.

The first thing which we need to get is to obtain access token. It can be done by sending another HTTP POST request to the following address: https://accounts.accesscontrol.windows.net/{tenant_name}.onmicrosoft.com/tokens/OAuth/2. In request body we need to provide several parameters which are described in the following list:

• grant_type = client_credentials
• client_id – client id of your Sharepoint app (you should register it in advance using /_layouts/15/appregnew.aspx and then grant appropriate permissions using /_layouts/15/appinv.aspx) in the following form {cliend_id}@{tenant_id}. You may check tenant id in Azure portal > Azure Active Directory > Properties > Directory ID
• client_secret – client secret of your Sharepoint app
• resource – should have value in the form 00000003-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000/{tenant_name}.onmicrosoft.com@{tenant_id}

so request should look like this in Postman:

If everything was configured properly you should get success response which should contain access_token in the response body. Copy it’s value – it will be needed on the next step.

Now we are ready to send search POST requests to search API endpoint. We will use https://{tenant_name}.sharepoint.com/_api/search/postquery address for that. Let’s get list of all sites using the following KQL query:

contentclass:STS_Site

Request body should look like this:

{
   "request":{
      "Querytext":"contentclass:STS_Site",
      "RowLimit":100,
      "SelectProperties":{
         "results":[
            "Title",
            "SiteID",
            "OriginalPath"
         ]
      }
   }
}

After that switch to Authorization type and select Type = Bearer Token and specify value of access_token which was obtained on the previous step:

On the Headers tab add Accept and Content-type headers with “application/json;odata=verbose” (note that it is important to specify these headers exactly like this: if you will specify different odata version request may return error because parameters schema may be different.):

If everything was done properly when you will execute POST request in Postman you will get list of Sharepoint sites in your tenant.