NPM and External Dependencies for PowerBI Custom Visuals

The custom slicer I built for Power BI has a few advanced UI features, clickable DIVs, a slider control, text input with validation.  It may have been possible to develop all of those interactions myself, but why intent the wheel.  jQuery and jQuery UI really add all of the features and simplify a lot of the coding.

Here's a step-by-step process that I used to get jQuery and jQuery-UI into my visual.

1. Start with Use Developer tools to create custom visuals.
2. Then add jQuery and the strong types to be TypeScript friendly:
1. npm install jquery
2. npm install "@types/jquery"
3. Add jQuery UI (this was the hard part, see below).

I'm new to Node.js projects (do I capitalize Node.js, yes?), and I'm still getting familiar with the overall structure.  The thing I'm getting off the bat is that the node_modules folder is special.  For one, it should be 100% managed by npm.  That means that stuff placed there shouldn't be committed to your code repository (I'm not there 100%, but I'm getting close). 

Full disclosure, I started by putting some non-TypeScript code there that I had written (CSS, custom JavaScript, etc.).  But it's not an npm package, so it shouldn't be there. I moved it to my src folder. Next, I tried and tried to use an npm package for jQuery UI.  I tried the jquery-ui package, but it has to be built.  Then I got some new info and tried the jquery-ui-dist package.  But, I'm getting an error when compiling.  Near the very last line of jquery-ui.css there's a rule:

filter: Alpha(Opacity=.3);

But, Node.js doesn't understand that rule and throws the error "error  LESS  style/visual.less : (1307,23) Could not parse alpha".  I did some searches and the only way to fix it is to modify the code.  I don't want to modify the code in  node_modules.

My fix was to download the vanilla version of jQuery UI.  Then cherry pick only the assets I need to be successful.  I grabbed jquery-ui.js, jquery-ui.min.js, and the minimal items from the css folder in the distribution.  For the timebeing they are in a jquery-ui folder in node_modules.  I know I just got done writing that this was bad, so my next step will be to move them to the src folder.  Optimally, it would be great if I could just use the jquery-ui-dist package, but it seems that I can't, yet...