Client-side People Picker control for Sharepoint 2013 Apps

When creating my "Sharepoint Hosted" App for Office365 (15) I had to use the client-side People Picker control in the App Part. There doesn't appear to be much in the way of documentation for this control other than the "How to" MSDN document here:

How to: Use the client-side People Picker control in apps for SharePoint

I wanted to default the control to the current user. From the document I could tell that there was a parameter in the init function that should contain an array of initial PickerEntity objects, but sadly no example of this. The example code simply passed a null where this should be.

SPClientPeoplePicker_InitStandaloneControlWrapper(peoplePickerElementId, null, schema); 

I like to use the jQuery deferred function with the SharePoint asynchronous requests so that I have some control over my code executing in a sequential manner.

Here is a snippet of code that demonstrates how to default the People Picker control to the current user:

$(document).ready(function () {  

    SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', sharePointReady);  

})  

  

function sharePointReady() {  

    context = new SP.ClientContext.get_current();  

    web = context.get_web();  

    getUser().done(function (user) {  

        var schema = {};  

        schema['PrincipalAccountType'] = 'User,DL,SecGroup,SPGroup';  

        schema['SearchPrincipalSource'] = 15;  

        schema['ResolvePrincipalSource'] = 15;  

        schema['AllowMultipleValues'] = false;  

        schema['MaximumEntitySuggestions'] = 50;  

        schema['Width'] = '280px';  

  

        var users = new Array(1);  

        var defaultUser = new Object();  

        defaultUser.AutoFillDisplayText = user.get_title();  

        defaultUser.AutoFillKey = user.get_loginName();  

        defaultUser.Description = user.get_email();  

        defaultUser.DisplayText = user.get_title();  

        defaultUser.EntityType = "User";  

        defaultUser.IsResolved = true;  

        defaultUser.Key = user.get_loginName();  

        defaultUser.Resolved = true;  

        users[0] = defaultUser;  

        SPClientPeoplePicker_InitStandaloneControlWrapper('peoplePickerDiv', users, schema);  

    });  

}  

  

function getUser() {  

    var dfd = $.Deferred(function () {  

        user = web.get_currentUser();  

        context.load(user);  

        context.executeQueryAsync(  

            function () {  

                dfd.resolve(user);  

            }),  

            function () {  

                dfd.reject(args.get_message());  

            };  

    });  

    return dfd.promise();  

}