How to use Project Server Online data in a SharePoint 2013 App using CSOM

This week I was attending the 3 day Project Ignite training. This is a technical training offered directly from Microsoft and was presented by Christophe Fiessinger and Jan Kalis at Warsaw (but I followed the training on Lync, which was really cool using the 360-video). I learned lots of new and interesting things about Project Server 2013 and Project Online. Thanks Christophe and Jan!

Of Course, that’s not the topic of this blog post. During the last day of the training, we got some information about the extensibility options for Project Server 2013. One of the topics was about CSOM, which is an abbreviation for Client-Side Object Model, and also about JSOM, which stands for Javascript Object Model. Let me use the slide from Project Ignite explaining what it is all about:

As you can see, an interesting topic to do some deep diving and (as Christophe told us to) doing our homework. I’ll guide you through the process of creating:

1. A console application, connecting to my local Project Server 2013 lab machine and create a project.
2. A SharePoint Autohosted app (based on my previous blogpost: Windows Azure auto-provisioned apps for SharePoint 2013), connecting my Project Online PWA instance using OAuth 2.0 and retrieving a list of projects.

1. Local Console Application

1. Microsoft.ProjectServer.Client.dll
2. Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll
3. Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll

Reference them in your project and open ‘Program.cs’. Add the code, listed here, to your application. I’m not going to repeat every piece of code, as it’s explained very well on that link. But what I want to mention is ‘security’. If you run your SharePoint/Project Server 2013 dev environment, and you develop your application on another machine, you need to provide credentials to connect to SharePoint/Project Server, in fact, you need to initialize the ProjectContext with those credentials. The ProjectContext contains the client-side context for development with a Project Web App instance, and contains the enterprise-wide collections of Project Server objects that exist in Project Web App. You can get the ProjectContext using your credentials with the following quick and dirty solution:

projContext = new ProjectContext(pwaPath);
projContext.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("Username", "Password");

2. SharePoint Autohosted App

var clientContext = TokenHelper.GetClientContextWithContextToken(hostWeb, contextToken, Request.Url.Authority)

public static ProjectContext GetProjectContextWithContextToken(
            string targetUrl,
            string contextTokenString,
            string appHostUrl)
        {
            SharePointContextToken contextToken = ReadAndValidateContextToken(contextTokenString, appHostUrl);

            Uri targetUri = new Uri(targetUrl);

            string accessToken = GetAccessToken(contextToken, targetUri.Authority).AccessToken;

            return GetProjectContextWithAccessToken(targetUrl, accessToken);
        }

 public static ProjectContext GetProjectContextWithAccessToken(string targetUrl, string accessToken)
        {
            Uri targetUri = new Uri(targetUrl);

            ProjectContext projectContext = new ProjectContext(targetUrl);

            projectContext.AuthenticationMode = ClientAuthenticationMode.Anonymous;
            projectContext.FormDigestHandlingEnabled = false;
            projectContext.ExecutingWebRequest +=
                delegate(object oSender, WebRequestEventArgs webRequestEventArgs)
                {
                    webRequestEventArgs.WebRequestExecutor.RequestHeaders["Authorization"] =
                        "Bearer " + accessToken;
                };

            return projectContext;
        }

using (var projectContext = TokenHelper.GetProjectContextWithContextToken(hostWeb, contextToken, Request.Url.Authority))
            {
                // Get the list of projects on the server.
                projectContext.Load(projectContext.Projects);
                projectContext.ExecuteQuery();

                foreach (PublishedProject pubProj in projectContext.Projects)
                {
                    Response.Write(string.Format("{0} :{1} : {2} </br>", pubProj.Id.ToString(), pubProj.Name, pubProj.CreatedDate.ToString()));
                }
            }

SharePoint added a site collection level feature near RTM that, once enabled, will allow you to F5 deploy from VisualStudio, no matter what type of site collection you are targeting. Until the new bits roll online and this is documented, your best option here is to F5 debug on-prem and publish an app package and use the corporate catalog to test online.

3. The things we learned 

1. You can do lots of things with the ProjectContext
2. Don’t forget to setup your Permissions in the AppManifest file
3. You can’t debug until RTM

Thanks to my colleague Koen Callens for the fun experience of creating our first App together! Thanks for reading, and enjoy creating your Project Server apps!