What’s new and what’s changed in SharePoint Online REST API in October 2018

It’s November and it’s time to review changes in SharePoint REST API in October with help of SharePoint RESE API Explorer. As usual I have to put below caution:

Please note, that all changes are gathered from Targeted tenant. Most likely this changes haven’t been officially introduced yet, use this post as spoilers to potential upcoming features. If you want to use APIs mentioned here, please check corresponding official documentation to make sure they are available.

With REST API explorer you can navigate between different endpoints, explore their structure, methods, classes and parameters. REST API explorer uses _api/$metadata endpoint to get the REST API data, parses it and presents in tree view format. REST API explorer also stores historical $metadata results in Azure storage making it possible to compare $metadata results we have today and month ago.

Root functions changes (_api/)

Nothing really fancy here. Some new methods were added to CompliancePolicy class, like LockRecordItem(), UnlockRecordItem(), PlaceOnHold(). In September a method called TenantRenameJob was added, now it’s removed. Somebody changed their mind

One method is pretty interesting though. Under Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.WebTemplateExtensions.SiteScriptUtility there is a method called AddSiteDesignTaskToCurrentWeb. The method AddSiteDesignTask was introduced in July 2018, it looks like in the nearest future there will be an option to add site design task to current web.

Entity changes

TenantRenameJob entities and properties were removed.

Some changes were introduced around Microsoft.SharePoint.ClientSideComponent.HostedApp. You can also see it from SharePoint CSOM October 2018 update. HostedApp, HostedAppsManager were added.

A lot of new classes were introduced under Microsoft.SharePoint.QuickActionMessageCard namespace. I’m not aware of this namespace and the purpose of it. If you know, please give me a hint in comments .

Project Server namespace were adjusted a bit with new classes and class properties, but that’s out of scope of our interest.

SP.Web object received a few updates. HideSiteLogo and HideSiteTitle were removed from properties. Added new interesting navigation property HostedApps, which is a reference to  HostedAppsManager  mentioned above. Two new functions were added as well – SetAccessRequestSiteDescriptionAndUpdate and PageContextInfo. As far as I understand the later one returns page context information (aka _spPageContext), however I haven’t manage to make it work.

So nothing too fascinating this time, lets see what will come in November.

Of course this list is not full, I just described something I found interesting, you can use API Changelog to explore other differences which were added in October 2018.