Corey Roth [MVP]

Contrary to popular belief, I still do development.  In fact, I do quite a bit of development.  In the last couple of years, I have built two mobile platforms as a service using Ionic and Angular.  This node.js based development stack positioned me well to start working with SPFx.  I'm starting up a string of blog posts that help cover the basics that I think that we often overlook in the bigger picture of how to do things with SPFx.  Today's topic is simple: reading a value from the query string.  When I recently looked at this simple scenario, I thought sure I could go back to my JavaScript roots and use location.href but there has to be a better way now right?  The SPFx team thought of that and they included a nice helper class to get you going called UrlQueryParameterCollection.

Start by including a reference to UrlQueryParameterCollection.

import { UrlQueryParameterCollection } from '@microsoft/sp-core-library';

We use the getValue() Like ASP.NET or other languages, you'll usually want to check to see if it has a value before using it.  I then cast it to an integer time after reading the value.

Again, this is a simple example, but hopefully it will keep you from going down the path with location.href.  The sp-core-library has all sorts of useful utitlities for you to use such as Environment, Random Number Generators, and logging.  Check it out the next time you start out a project.