Here’s a heads up if you are uploading assets such as CSS files to SharePoint Online. In a solution I’m working on we have an “Alternate CSS” file that we upload to the master page gallery. It contains the following line:
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@import url("//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.4.0/css/font-awesome.min.css"); |
Nothing special there. Everything was fine until one day when the icons stopped loading. Debugging led me to the CSS file, in which above line had been changed:
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@import url("//mytenant.sharepoint.com///maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.4.0/css/font-awesome.min.css") |
Notice that “//mytenant.sharepoint.com” has been added to the url. When I saw this I assumed I had made some error. I checked my original files and upload procedures, but could find nothing wrong. Provisioning the file again fixed the problem everyone was happy.
But a month or so later it happened again. Could SharePoint be modifying the file? We contacted Microsoft support and asked if they knew anything about it. They confirmed that they do indeed modify files in SharePoint Online through a time job that runs before site colection updates. Basically their response was: Deal with it.
So how *do* we deal with this? What we did was to replace “//” with “https://”. So far this seems to be working, but we are aware that it might break at any time. To be really sure you will want to skip @import statements (and other URL:s) in files you upload to SharePoint. But we don’t know what kind of files Microsoft takes the liberty to modify, nor if they process all locations or just the master page gallery. The only safe solution is probably to skip SharePoint altogether and move the files to a separate web server that you are in control of.
What we have to remember is that SharePoint Online is a cloud service, and as such, the operator is in complete control of changes. There are a lot of hidden rules and jobs going on behind the scenes in SharePoint Online that customers are not aware of. Microsoft does not necessarily tell us when changes happen or what the implications will be. And they might change the rules at any time. So we need to be cautious, even when dealing with with supported features such as Alternate CSS.
