Showing posts with label DelveBlog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DelveBlog. Show all posts

Tuesday 14 June 2016

Retrieve Office 365 Delve Blogs Programmatically using REST API

In this article, you will learn how to get the blogs from Office 365 delve sites on the custom components programmatically using REST API with various filter options.

Query Options :


By default, when user tries to create a blog post from delve user page, the page will be redirected to user's personal site page. All the posts created on delve blog page will be stored in the user’s personal site. i.e., under “/portals/personal/userfirstname/” site.
Some of the queriable fields are content types, file types and file extensions. Only these field values are unique for blogs created on the Office 365 blog site which will not be similar to other items. Some of the unique properties and values are,
  • Content type - The blogs stored on the portal uses story page content type.
  • Secondary File Extensions - The file extension is aspx page but secondary file extension used is PointPub which is unique.
  • File Type - The file type of the blog is PointPub.
We will see how we can query to get the desired results using Search REST API.

Using content type:

First we will find out the content type of story page manually from Office 365 site.
  • From personal site collection, navigate to see all lists folder and then select pages folder. (Or just append “/portals/personal/userfirstname/ppg” to the url and open to see the pages library directly)
  • Go to library settings of Pages library.
  • Click on the Story Page content type. If content types not found, go to advanced settings and allow the content types.
  • From the URL of story page content type, get ctype value. Ctype values shows the content type id of the respective content type. 
Then we need to build the search REST API URL to query the content.

The search REST API using content type will look like below.

Using File Type:

We can also query the blogs using the file type. The file type used for blog is PointPub. The information is stored in JSON format in PointPub files. The file contains the information like Title, SubTitle, Author, Published data, Value, etc. Value contains blog content for each blog.

The search REST API using file type will look like below.

Instead of using file type, you can also use secondary file extension property to filter out the blog data.

We will use Jquery Ajax call to query and get the blog details. In the below code snippet, I have used file type to get all the blog data present on Office 365 site using search API. Similarly other search REST API Url’s can be used to retrieve the blog results.
  1. $.ajax({  
  2.     url: "/_api/search/query?querytext='filetype:PointPub'"// URL can also use content type id to filter the blog data  
  3.     type: "GET",  
  4.     async: false,  
  5.     headers: { "accept""application/json;odata=verbose" },  
  6.     success: function(data){  
  7.         var blogInfo = data.d.query.PrimaryQueryResult.RelevantResults;  
  8.         var blogResults = blogInfo.Table.Rows.results;  
  9.         console.log("Title : "+blogResults[0].Cells.results[3]);  
  10.         console.log("Author : "+blogResults[0].Cells.results[4]);  
  11.     },  
  12.     error: function(data){  
  13.     }  
  14. });  
In the above example, title and author values are retrieved for first blog present in the collection. similarly, other properties or blog content can be retrieved from the collection by changingblogResults[i].Cells.results[j] result set.

Monday 13 June 2016

An Overview of Office 365 Delve Blogs


In this post, you will see about Office 365 Delve Blogs component. The blog feature is supported on Office 365 delve, where users will be able to create or view blogs on the Office 365 portal.


Blog:


Microsoft has introduced new blogs feature on Office 365 delve. Delve creates separate site collection for portals (/portals/hub). It has app pages folder within the site collection which has 2 pages. Here, Point publishing page is present. The delve blogs are stored or can be viewed from point publishing page. Each o365 account will have access to these sites and pages (which is created by default).
At the bottom of delve user page, users will get the blog component.

If users click on all posts link, it will take us to user's blog page where users can add or view their blog posts. Users can create from delve home page or blog page. The following snapshot shows user's blog page.


The saved blogs will immediately start appearing on the blogs page, but not on the delve user page. It will take few minutes of time for published blogs to be available on delve user page. The delay is because of search crawl. The blog posts component on the delve users page is rendered based on the search index. Search should run periodically to get display the blog posts.
Now we will see how we can retrieve the blog posts available on delve user’s page. Users can create new blog by clicking new post tile or by clicking new post from delve user page.

Here, users can put their own data with the existing design. There are multiple options for users to put their content.
  • Images can be added as banner for the blog post.
  • Title or subtitle can be given to the blog post.
  • By clicking the plus icon on the blog content area, Users can put the blog content with text, document links or images, etc.

For inserting blog content, there are many options. Users can insert text with available custom format or can insert the content from the existing portal.

Using Text Section

  • Header – To add header sub title for sections 
  • Text – Paragraph content can be inserted using this component. Within this component, other styling options can also applied. 

  • Bulleted list or Numbered list – To put the content in list format. 
  • Pull Quote – To highlight the paragraph or lines.


Using Content Section

  • Image – Images can be inserted from portal or local drive. 
  • Document – The documents present on the portal using link or directly from one drive. Once inserted, Office Web App preview of the document will be available on the page. The preview page can also be set for document inserted from settings of OWA component.

  • Video – Videos can be inserted from the video portal.
You can insert any element anywhere on the blog to complete it. Then you can save and publish the blog.