Microsoft recently released a beta version 1.21 of SharePoint Framework with minor feature updates regarding the user interface components. The public release is expected to contain more features.
On February 25th, 2024, Microsoft released the new SharePoint Framework (SPFx) 1.21 version, five months after the last minor version 1.20. Patch updates are rarely released for SharePoint Framework, but since version 1.17 Microsoft announced that they were going to release smaller patches more frequently instead of waiting longer to release the new features.
Version 1.21 beta of SPFx contains two feature updates and one tooling update. As the general availability version of 1.21 is expected around April/May timeframe, Microsoft has stated that they plan to include “further new capabilities and technical updates”.
On February 13th 2025, Microsoft introduced flexible sections for SharePoint pages and news. It allows page authors to build pages without strict column structure, as it was the case with SharePoint since SPFx was introduced. There is a new section type called ‘Flexible’ where web parts can be dragged freely and resized to any desirable size.
SPFx 1.21 adds this option to web part developers. By default, all custom web parts are supported in the flexible layout without any code change. However, the web part manifest file now allows to specify flexible layout sizing in detail:
"flexibleLayoutSizing": {
"supportsDynamicResizing": true,
"defaultRowHeight": 10,
"defaultColumnWidth": 10
}
Version 1.21 of SPFx contains an update for Microsoft Viva Connections components. The Viva Connections components in SPFx are delivered in the form of Adaptive Card Extensions (ACEs), UI components that leverage adaptive cards’ visual language. While adaptive cards are broader in scope and present in several Microsoft products such as Outlook, Teams or SharePoint, the adaptive card extensions are a component of Viva Connections.
Viva Connections will now allow users to configure and add new cards to a company-provided dashboard. By default, new Viva Connections cards in version 1.21 have personalization disabled, but it can be enabled by changing the personalization option in the adaptive card manifest.
The final minor update for this baseline version of SPFx 1.21 beta is that the default Teams JavaScript SDK for Teams solutions included with SPFx has been bumped to version 2.32. The Teams JS SDK’s latest release is 2.34.
The full release notes of the changes in the version 1.21 are available on the GitHub release page. As this version is a beta, developers must use the @next version tag to install the SPFx 1.21 to their development machines.
npm install @microsoft/generator-sharepoint@next --global
To upgrade from SPFx 1.20 to 1.21 beta version, the 1.20 packages from package.json file have to be uninstalled and the 1.21.0-beta.0 packages installed instead. Alternatively, a CLI tool can be used to upgrade the solutions to the latest SPFx version.
SharePoint Framework (or SPFx) is the set of tools and libraries for building extensibility options in Microsoft 365. With SharePoint Framework developers can create solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva products. The SPFx uses industry-standard tooling such as Yeoman, TypeScript, Lint, WebPack and other client-side libraries. The issues list is hosted on GitHub and currently has 1026 open issues.
