Beginning Microsoft Graph with JavaScript Applications

Sahil Malik: Welcome to Introduction to Microsoft Graph with JavaScript applications. Let’s start with some mutual introductions. Little bit about me. My name is Sahil Malik and I’m a consultant, author, and trainer. I’ve written 20 plus books, been an MVP for 15ish years, spoken at numerous conferences and videos. This is my twitter handle and that’s my website through which you can reach me. Let’s get started.

As more and more organizations are moving their data and functionality into the cloud. Naturally for a lot of third party vendors and custom code, there is a lot of value in your applications being able to tap into this data and functionality. You can do so using Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph is nothing but just a bunch of rest API’s that you can call, but you need to authenticate. You need to authenticate with something called Az- Azure AD. Azure active directory, I’ll be introducing all these terms to you in depth through this video. But yes, your applications need to authenticate properly, and then they can just call a rest API to tap into this rich data and functionality that is sitting in the cloud.

So let’s say that you see the value in tapping into this functionality. So what are the steps we go through? Well number one, you need to pick a platform. There are lots of different kinds of applications. Microsoft Graph doesn’t care what your platform is whether it’s an IOS app, Android app, web application, Demon, really anything. As long as it can call a REST service, it qualifies to use Microsoft Graph.

Next thing. Well we need to authenticate. Authenticate here involves learning some basics about Azure AD, and there are a lot of different ways to authenticate, and the specific way that you pick is dependent on the platform of choice.

Your first question. Pick a platform. Once you have authenticated, then you just call a REST API. So remember, picking the right platform and authenticating dictates how exactly you’re going to authenticate and how will you manage the token or session. For instance, web applications prefer to maintain session using well the web session. Whereas, native applications use refresh tokens and access tokens, and as we’ll see shortly, JavaScript applications cannot make use of refresh tokens. I’ll be talking about that in this course.

Once you have authenticated, then it’s just a matter of calling a REST API with an access token. Simple as that. Our focus here is to call Microsoft Graph from JavaScript applications. So remember that the gambit of what you can call Microsoft Graph from is pretty wide. IOS applications, Android, native applications, websites, web API’s, these are all topics we can dive deeper into.

However, my focus here is to talk about JavaScript applications talking to Microsoft Graph, and specifically in order to do that, we will use something called OAuth2 Implicit Flow. This is into something I will be explaining in the subsequent segments.

Let’s talk about the objectives we wish to achieve. After this introduction, I’ll introduce you to the major players. Scenario Description: What is Azure AD? What is Microsoft Graph? What are JavaScript applications? Then we’ll dive into some technical details and talk about OAuth2 Implicit Flow, things like token management, what libraries am I using, V1, V2 API’s. All this will become clear shortly, and once we have all that theory behind us, then we will build an application, set up a project. How do you set up your application in Azure AD and how do you authenticate and call Microsoft Graph? And then we’ll end with exploring the possibilities. What else can you build with this technology? Let’s get started.