I have created a SharePoint Framework WebPart using AngularJS 1.5.8 (not using TypeScript) which was working fine in workbench.html. However I have noticed that we get intermittent errors and WebPart failed to render when a user does things like refresh. We could reproduce this error in all the major browsers.
Errors
TypeError: s.bootstrap is not a function
TypeError: qa.fn is undefined
Analysis
One thing is very clear from the error is that the angular related objects/modules are not recognized when the SPFx WebPart is trying to bootstrap. So I started analyzing the other components involved in the page and I could find the following
- Custom JavaScript Injections injected in the page such as global navigation using JQuery 1.11.1
- More than one SPFx WebPart using angualr 1.5.8
Options Tried
- Initially I thought it might be an angular load timing/sequence issue and tried to reference angular in the page layout directly but no luck
- MS Engineer suggested to load JQuery latest version(2.X or 3.X) for custom actions but still I could not resolve the issue.
- I also tried to load the custom actions with JQuery noConflict() method
Root Cause
As we all aware angular uses the lite version of JQuery internally. If JQuery is not available in the page, angular.element delegates to AngularJS’s built-in subset of JQuery, called jqLite. I noticed the SPFx WebPart was loading in all the browsers consistently when custom actions with no JQuery or without custom actions on the page. This means the JQuery(any version) included in the custom action conflicts with the jqLite included in angular. This was the root cause.
Solution
Now I have 2 options
- Remove JQuery from custom actions
- Avoid JQuery Conflict in SPFX WebPart
In my case I adopted option 1 because I can replace the JQuery related code with pure Javascript in custom actions and there is no clear documentation about option 2.
As per the MS Engineer, The product group is looking at adding some documentation/samples to show how to do option 2. Let us wait for this update as we can not completely avoid JQuery in SharePoint Development.
Reference