Creating an employee self-service mobile app Pt 1

The Brief

Create a mobile app for company employees to view holiday entitlement and book holiday requests.

Requirements:

Works on both Android and Apple phones.
Does not require user accounts to be registered in our company Active Directory.
App should provide self-service registration and authenticate with minimal interaction required from HR and/or IT.

Technologies

Progressive Web App
Azure Static Web Apps
Azure DevOps
Entra External ID

Steps

Create project in Azure DevOps

Create project in Azure DevOps
Initialize main branch with a README or gitignore
Select VisualStudio .gitignore

Entra ID Tenant - Create SWA

Create SWA in main Entra ID tenant
- Plan Type = Standard
- Deployment details
  - Source = Azure DevOps
  - Build Details = Custom
  - App location = “/src”
  - Api location = “/api”
  - Output location = ""

Create Customer Tenant

Not all Tenant Creations are equal: Ensure you are in your company's main Microsoft Entra ID tenant when performing this step. When writing this post, I selected to create a tenant whilst already in a Customer tenant I had created earlier. The options for the "Select a tenant type" had the "Azure AD B2C" option disabled.

Subscription Requirement: "If you're creating a customer tenant for the first time, you have the option to create a trial tenant that doesn't require an Azure subscription."

Register an app in the Customer Tenant

App registrations
- Supported account types = Single tenant
- Redirect URIs
  - Platform = Web
  - URI = https://«SWA-URL»azurestaticapps.net/.auth/login/aad/callback
- Implicit grant = ID tokens
- API Permissions
  - email
  - offline_access
  - openid
  - profile

Create User Flow

Enable guest self-service sign up
Create new user flow
Identity Providers = Email one-time passcode
User attributes = Given Name, Surname, Display Name

Configure SWA in Entra ID Tenant

Add ClientSecret and ClientID to SWA configuration

Coding the SWA

Build Error: Oryx could not find a 'build' or 'build:azure' script in the package configuration.

Solution: Add skip_app_build: true

Build Error: Failed to find a default file in the app artifacts folder (/).

Solution: Change app_location from "/" to "./src".