Deskpro Apps SDK

Deskpro Apps SDK provides a client for communicating with the Deskpro system, React UI components as well as basic styles and utilities for use in simple apps and widgets.

Installation

Install the SDK via pnpm or npm:

pnpm add @deskpro/app-sdk

OR

npm install @deskpro/app-sdk

Basic Usage

When communicating with the Deskpro system, an app or widget must register "listeners" for key events:

• onReady - when an app is loaded, but is not necessarily shown to the user
• onShow - the app has been revealed to the user
• onChange - the data (context) being passed to the app from Deskpro has changed

To register a listener you'll need to first import and create a Deskpro client, register the listener(s) and then lastly run the client:

import { createClient } from "@deskpro/app-sdk";

const client = createClient();

client.onReady((context) => {
  // do something when the app is ready
});

client.onShow((context) => {
  // do something when the app is shown to the user
});

client.onChange((context) => {
  // do something when the "context" data has changed
});

client.run();

As an aside, it's always best to "run" the client after the page is loaded, the easiest way to do this is to register the client.run() call as a window.onload method:

import { createClient } from "@deskpro/app-sdk";

const client = createClient();

window.onload = () => client.run();

// ...

To make fetch requests via the app proxy, and therefore gain access to app settings, we've provided a utility that wraps the native fetch function in the browser:

import { createClient, proxyFetch } from "@deskpro/app-sdk";

const client = createClient();

window.onload = () => client.run();

proxyFetch(client).then((dpFetch) => {
  // Use dpFetch() just like you would use fetch() natively.
  dpFetch("https://example.com/api/things?api_key=__key__").then((res) => {
    // ...
  });
});

Notice that the proxy will replace placeholders with the format __<setting>__. In this example, __key__ will be replaced with the app backend setting key. Proxy setting placeholders may be placed in the URL, headers or body of the request.

You can also control aspects of Deskpro itself, like the app title and icon badge count. To do this, use the client again to set these properties:

import { createClient } from "@deskpro/app-sdk";

const client = createClient();

window.onload = () => client.run();

client.setTitle("My New Title");
client.setBadgeCount(42);

UI Components

The Apps SDK exports several Deskpro UI components and is supported by a published Storybook story of each.

All app UI components reside in src/ui/components and usually consist of three files each:

• Component file, e.g. Button.tsx that exports or compounds the component
• Story file, e.g. Button.stories.tsx that contains the story for the component
• Index file

To start developing UI components, run Storybook with:

pnpm start

When you're ready to build, run the standard build process for this library:

pnpm build

Note: UI components are not bundled, instead they're available in the ESM and CJS module builds.

Tests

To run the SDK test suite, execute the following:

pnpm test

OR

npm run test