For some time, I have been trying to get a provider hosted app setup to work, and I am afraid that I - as a relative novice - must have missed some key points despite hours of googling and reading. Here's my questions:
- A remote, provider hosted app, would have its AppWeb in a domain that is different from the host SharePoint Farm in which it is gets installed and used. In other words, the AppWeb may be located at remote.contoso-apps.com, where as the SharePoint farm uses for instance spslocal.mycorp.com. However, when you - in the SharePoint host farm - set up your App Domain/App isolation - you can only provide one value - which in this case would then need to be remote.contoso-apps.com??? Does that mean that each SharePoint Farm can only contain Apps from one vendor delivering remote apps? Or is the key in hard coding the app web in the manifest? (However, even if I've tried this it seems like the token SPAppWebUrl still translates into the pattern defined in the App Isolation Settings in the host farm???).
- Back to the AppWeb: Many bloggers have mentioned that you have to add some kind of SharePoint element to your App project (not the Web Project part) to get the AppWeb provisioned from Visual Studio 2013. But at what stage are these SharePoint elements actually
provisioned - during some kind of publish operation of the Web Project part (the Pages, Scripts etc.) or when you install the app package (hardly the latter, since the first installation may be when a customer installs the app???). The reason I ask is (of
course) that my SharePoint Elements do not seem to get provisioned. And just to test my very basic understanding: the AppWeb can be any pure IIS web site from the start - i.e., not a SharePoint Web App?
Thanks for any help on these challenging issues!