I have been updating my 5entences add-in install for use in the AppSource/App Center for Office, plus adding an auto-summarization capability via OpenAI. 😉 COMING SOON!!!!
Originally, this add-in was using the Dialog API inside the “original” OnSend event. This was a bit nifty as it presented the user with a blocking popup that would allow them to manage everything in one place. It told them, they had more than 5 sentences, and would suggest they go back and fix it, or go ahead and send it. But that type of event is NOT supported in the App Store.
I have an Office 365 account and installed Office 365 from my portal.office.com page, made sure I was updated, and everything was looking good, except that:
When I have my personal Outlook.com email address attached to Outlook, I cannot debug add-ins in Outlook full client on Windows.
Even when I did remove my Outlook.com email address, my events were still not firing.
Everything worked great in Office on the Web.
So, I proceeded with updating the code using Office on the web to debug, giving up on Outlook full client in the interim. Once I got everything working well in Outlook on the Web, I went back to Outlook on Windows and began to lose my hair.
I quickly discovered that my ES6 code in the command.js, were not working. As you dig into the documentation you find that the WebViewURL and the override for JSRuntime, sharing the same file become an issue. It turns out that even with the WebView2 control installed on my box, and even though I have the latest version of Office 365 full client installed, my JSRuntime code reverts to Trident+ (IE11). I refactored my code to:
stop using const, instead var everything.
stop using => arrow operators, reverting to full function()
The reason I reverted, is because I pulled out all transpiling and polyfills because they SLOW down my add-in code, make it too large and it impacts my already overwhelmed server. I also like to remain as pure JavaScript ES6 as I can. I am a bit puritanical, I guess. 😆
But even with all that it did not work. So, line by line I went and found the first problem:
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That code seemed to work, but the add-in would just hang telling me “…it is taking too long… Try Again.” I resolved it by doing this:
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Essentially, I had to put the associate at the root of the file. Without the PC check, this would bomb on Office online and the Mac, so I gated that with the function you see: IsPC(). And Office online needs the Office.onReady() in the root to work effectively, so you see that there. But putting Office.ready() in the root broken Outlook on Windows, but also ignoring it/not using it, gave me the same problem. I discovered that if I put it in the event activation itself, as you see, I was finally able to get into my event handler and execute and Office.context (line of code). However, deeper in my code, it was STILL failing.
Debugging my code further, I had a LOT of Regex to determine what was going on in the body of the email. Introduce Trident+ and IE11 (es5), and you realize that “look heads” and a lot of really cool stuff I have grown accustomed to do not work. So, I struggled and struggled, until I just sent to my friend ChatGPT and asked it to produce me IE11 compatible Regex for each of my Regex statements. And then viola, my add-in was fully functional on Windows and Office online.
I am still a hacker by nature – what works, works. And I have converted from Office Add-ins written in C# with Visual Studio Tools to Office to this OfficeJS paradigm. I spend a lot of time reading the documentation and I SWEAR it tells me that with my version of Office 365 and having the WebView2 control installed, I should not be reverting to IE11 (Trident+) for Smart Events:
Microsoft® Outlook® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2308 Build 16.0.16731.20052) 64-bit
But maybe it is buried in there somewhere that on Windows/PC, it always uses IE11 for Smart Events. Either way, to make sure you support 99% of the market out there, I guess you need to write you code like this or use polyfills and transpile. Bottom line is I got it to work. If anyone else is having similar issues, hopefully this helps. If anyone has an alternative or can point to something I am doing wrong (other than using polyfills and transpile my code), I am open to suggestions.
I recently got a question about this add-in created as a sample by the Microsoft Office Developer Team. It is provided as a sample and is a challenging bit of code to follow. It all started because I was trying to provide some advice to someone who is new to the OfficeJS world (but not Office development in general). They wanted to build a cross-platform add-in for a cause. After tinkering with it for a few hours, I managed to get it to work. But then I looked it over and it was quite a bit of tinkering on my part.
In most cases I create Add-ins based on React, but because I have done a lot of Trello development of late, I have gotten into more of a pure ES6 vibe. The code provided in the add-in as I stated was hard to follow because I think I am losing my jQuery and ES5 JavaScript skills.
Anyway, as I said, I spent a few hours today and worked on getting it into ES6 format by moving most of the code into classes, removing redundant code, removing redundant HTML pages, consolidating CSS and adding a lot of additional JSDoc comments throughout the code.
NOTE: This looks and behaves exactly the same, but I have not thoroughly tested it. So, it might be a bit rough here and there. If you encounter issues please let me know. 😁
In writing my new Outlook Add-in (Send to Trello), I got stuck on attachments. The first version did not include an attachments option because of two unique problems that compounded each other:
The Office Add-in API no longer provides a Media Type/MIME Type with an attachment request. I am able to get the “blob()” from Office, but other than the file extension there is not a way to determine the type. But sometimes a file does not have an extension, or the extension is wrong, etc.
The Trello API will not let you upload without supplying a MIME type, you cannot just give it a Base64 string as an attachment and let them figure it out.
So, I found out something interesting while researching a workaround. Most every base64 string of a specific file type starts with the same “prolog” of text. Using this, combined with the fallback of the file extensions, I was able to get attachments to work (for the attachment types supported by Trello). So, v1.02 will now include attachments.
Anway, as for the workaround I found, this might be ugly, but wanted to share it anyway:
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What this sample add-in does is pops up a dialog box anytime you press Send on an email with a question: “Are you sure?” If you click Yes, it sends, if you click “no” is blocks the send. Here is what that dialog looks like:
If you have followed the steps from my Yo Office post, you will be able to open the project in VS Code, and from the terminal, launch it with:
npm start
Next, you will need to follow the steps to enable the OnSend policy in your account and then you will need to install/sideload the manifest. From there you will not see any appearance of the add-in at all, until you press the Send button.
NOTE: At the point I first tested it on June, 13th, 2017, there is a KNOWN ISSUE with the certificates created fro a “yo office” build. If you have not resolved the certificates issue you will be able to start the project in Node.js, but the add-in will fail to run. You need to perform the steps outlined here to correct it:
You know, sometimes the way you want to do things is not necessarily the right way. And even then the right way makes life so hard you want to cry. With Office.JS I recently blogged about “a way” you can test multiple sprints of your add-in in your development environment: Testing a Web Add-in with Multiple Manifest. In this article I explain a method of creating multiple manifests to point to each “version or sprint” of your add-in. Recently, I found that one of my customers threw a wrinkle into that idea. Not that creating multiple manifests was impossible, but they were needing two conflating factors:
Each sprint points to a different folder of HTML/JS.
And they needed to use query string parameters (like this post) to load one of maybe 20 different configuration settings.
With up to 20 configurations per sprint and lets say 4 sprints, you end up with 80 manifest files. So, this is untenable. You need more choices, then enter necessity…
So, lets say you need to test multiple configurations and multiple sprints. Here is how you will set this up:
You will publish each sprint of your Web Site Project into a different folder in IIS. Like this:
Different sprints in separate folders
Then, you will create a new HTML page. I called mine Launcher.html. This page will contain a submit button and two drop-down select controls:
One for sprints
One for configs
Next, you will modify your manifest. You can add a new button called “Sprint Testing” for example and have it launch: Launcher.html.
In the Launcher.JS, populate those dropdowns. You can populate these hard coded into the HTML, from your client side JS or call your service controller. In my example, I call my service controller.
When the user clicks the submit button after choosing the desired settings, you will build the URL to the proper sprint folder and then append the config values to the current query string (that last item is critical so that your sprint Compose/Read page will get the important Office related query string values passed to it). You will see I do this below by replacing my “launcher.html”, replacing it will the new path, then append the config setting:
Once done your code will perform a location.replace() on the url and you will have your proper sprint and configuration loaded. You will only have a single manifest file and you will be able to test/regress test as much as needed with different sprints and configurations.
Here is what the HTML page I created looks like when loaded:
Here is the HTML:
[code lang=”javascript” collapse=”true” title=”click to expand if the github.com embedding below is not visible.”]
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Select Which Sprint to Launch</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<script src="https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com/lib/1/hosted/office.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Scripts/jquery-3.1.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="launcher.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<h3>Please select the sprint you wish to launch:</h3>
<select id="selectSprintList">
</select>
<h3>Please select the configuration:</h3>
<select id="selectConfigList">
</select>
<button id="launchSprintButton">Submit</button>
</body>
</html>
[/code]
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[code lang=”javascript” collapse=”true” title=”click to expand if the github.com embedding below is not visible.”]
/// <reference path="Scripts/jquery-3.1.1.js" />
(function () {
‘use strict’;
Office.initialize = function (reason) {
$(document).ready(function (reason) {
/// Upon load connect to the server and request
/// the sprints so that we can fill the select
/// field on the form.
makeAjaxCall("GetSprints", null, function (response) {
/** @type {String} */
var data = response.Message.toString();
/** @type {String[]} */
var results = data.split(",");
$.each(results, function (index, value) {
$("#selectSprintList").append("
<option>" + value + "</option>");
})
}, function (error) {
$(document).append("
" + error + "
");
});
makeAjaxCall("GetConfigs", null, function (response) {
/** @type {String} */
var data = response.Message.toString();
/** @type {String[]} */
var results = data.split(",");
$.each(results, function (index, value) {
$("#selectConfigList").append("
<option>" + value + "</option>");
})
});
$("#launchSprintButton").click(function (event) {
/// The user clicked the submit button. Build the URL
/// from the selection in the select control and
/// change the location
var sprint = $("#selectSprintList").val();
var config = $("#selectConfigList").val();
var url = "";
if (sprint != null && sprint != "" &&
config != null && sprint != "") {
// replace the launcher page with the proper sprint folder location,
// but be sure to keep all the query string values – to pass on
// to our OfficeJS page. However, add our one config setting to the end
url = window.location.href.replace("launcher.html", sprint + "/ComposeMessage.html");
url += "&Config=" + config;
// replace the url
location.replace(url);
}
});
});
}
})();
// Helper function to call the web service controller
makeAjaxCall = function (command, params, callback, error) {
var dataToPassToService = {
Command: command,
Params: params
};
$.ajax({
url: ‘api/Default’,
type: ‘POST’,
data: JSON.stringify(dataToPassToService),
contentType: ‘application/json;charset=utf-8’,
headers: { ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’: ‘*’ },
crossDomain: true
}).done(function (data) {
callback(data);
}).fail(function (status) {
error(status.statusText);
})
};
[/code]
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And here is the code for the controller, now, I cheated and just returned a string value for each call, but this at least help you get the idea of how to build your own list for sprints and configs:
[code lang=”javascript” collapse=”true” title=”click to expand if the github.com embedding below is not visible.”]
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Web.Http;
namespace OutlookLauncherDemoWeb.Controllers
{
public class DefaultController : ApiController
{
///
<summary>
/// Service Request – incoming
/// </summary>
public class WebServiceRequest
{
public string Command { get; set; }
public string[] Params { get; set; }
}
///
<summary>
/// Service Response – outgoing
/// </summary>
public class WebServiceResponse
{
public string Status { get; set; }
public string Message { get; set; }
}
[HttpPost()]
public WebServiceResponse Values(WebServiceRequest request)
{
WebServiceResponse response = null;
switch (request.Command)
{
case "GetSprints":
return getSprints();
case "GetConfigs":
return getConfigs();
}
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The idea here is that this add-in is a baseline for yours. You can build these components into a debug build of your add-in and it will call into each separate folder/sprint where you have posted previous versions.
As I start to delve deeper into the world of Office.JS and JavaScript, I am having some fits with how things are done and how things are implemented. Besides getting used to a whole new load of terms, finding out that there are more frameworks than there are developers (ok, maybe that is a small exaggeration), or that JavaScript is not “really” object-oriented (and that’s “ok”) is just nearly too much to handle.
Then there is one of my biggest complains with JavaScript is it use of types. You can get in a lot of trouble here and you can even break JavaScript from its root if you really prototype something wrong (see monkey patching). Additionally, scope can be an issue. And then there is Visual Studio 2015 doing it’s best to try to help you with types, but then it fails you. For example, you type “something(dot)” and you expect IntelliSense to come to the rescue – and low and behold, you get what I like to call: “The yellow bangs of hell.“(tm)
I have been coding with this problem thinking I am all alone in this world screaming every time an object, string, or number fails at IntelliSense. Then on an internal Microsoft email thread where the virtues of TypeScript and JavaScript were being contemplated, a whole world was opened before my eyes. Enter JSDoc. Turns out there is an entire specification around this. And even better – Visual Studio 2015 support it. And it is pretty easy to use. Plus type definition is just the tip of the iceberg, there is a LOT more for me to lesrn. But for now, here is an example of how to define a few common types I frequently use:
[code language=”javascript”]
/** @type {XMLDocument} */
var xmlDoc = $.parseXML(ewsResult.value);
/** @type {string} */
var theString;
/** @type {number} */
var myNumber;
[/code]
I have started to use this very recently in my proof of concepts I work on with my customers and I think I just increased my productivity by 50% (or more). Holy cow.
As you might know (or I hope you do by now), Office Web Add-ins are the new thing. And if you have recently started a project in this new paradigm, you know that it is quite different from Office COM/VSTO/VBA based coding. There is a little bit of a learning curve and some of the new code patterns (namely async) make doing things “the old way” not quite possible. As such this can make getting your head around this programming model a tad tough. And then there is JavaScript too.
One of my colleagues, Michael Zlatkovsky (a member of the Office.JS development team at Microsoft) is writing a book: Building Office Add-ins using Office.JS.
I have had an opportunity to read this book and believe it to be a great resource to understanding the new model. Some of the best parts of the book are where he covers the concepts behind the model, its use of async (and why), how to get around some of the challenges of async with Promises (great chapter), the way to use the Office context objects with some great code patterns, and much, much more.
A customer I was working with wanted help developing a fully on-premises Outlook web add-in. By this, they wanted no part of it to reach out to the Internet (Azure or Office 365). They wanted:
To connect to their internal Exchange server
An internal IIS website
And no references to the Internet (including the Office.js).
This is the topology we are trying to achieve:
If you have developed an Office Web Add-in lately, you find it is inherently biased to the Internet. Even the samples and solutions provided assume Office 365/Exchange and Azure websites. In a default, new Visual Studio solution, the links to the Office.js libraries and stylesheets are all pointing to the web. And, so as you might expect, there are some challenges to getting it to work on-premises only.
This posting covers what you must do to get such a solution to work, including getting past some pitfalls.
First, you have to download the Office.js files locally. And especially for Outlook because the Office.js files that are provided by default in your solution folder (“for offline debugging” as part of VS2015U3 or earlier) are missing some features to work with specific builds of Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016. You will run into some strange “type” missing and “Office not defined” errors if you forget this step.
Once you have downloaded the Office.JS files, you will delete all the files under the Scripts\Office\1 folder and copy in the contents you downloaded in step 1.
Comment out that line and add the following two lines:
[code language=”html”]
<!– <script src="https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com/lib/1/hosted/office.js" type="text/javascript></script> –>
<script src="../../Scripts/Office/MicrosoftAjax.js" type="text/javascript"></script>;
<script src="../../Scripts/Office/1.1/office.js" type="text/javascript"></script>;
[/code]
Once you have developed your solution, you must setup your IIS server. In general here is what you must do:
The IIS Server must have ASP.NET installed, it must have .NET4 installed and you must have the Web Application role enabled.
Open IIS Manager
Create a site, and figure the folder path
Convert the site to an Application
Apply an SSL certificate that is already trusted on all your client computers or that has a root certificate authority that is trusted on all your client computers. If you browse to your site using HTTPS and you get a RED warning about an untrusted site, then the certificate is not trusted or properly setup.
Next, and this was a major issue to troubleshoot, your Exchange Web Services certificate cannot be expired. If it is, any EWS call you make will return “succeeded” but will be blank – missing data. Digging into the logs you might find an error: “ErrorInvalidClientAccessTokenRequest” The Microsoft Exchange Server Auth Certificate that is used for OAuth needs to be updated. To do this you have to be logged into the Exchange server as administrator:
Run this cmdlet to identify the thumbprint of the certificate being used for OAUTH:Get-AuthConfig | FT currentcertificate*
Run this cmdlet to identify the thumbprint of certificates used for other Exchange servers (IIS, SMTP, etc.):Get-ExchangeCertificate | Fl *thumb*
Run these cmdlets to configure Exchange to use the valid certificate (copy/paste the thumbprint from the Get-ExchangeCertificate output):$today = Get-Date
Set-AuthConfig -NewCertificateThumbprint newthumbprint -NewCertificateEffectiveDate $today -Force
Run this cmdlet to make sure the changes are published to the environmentSet-AuthConfig -PublishCertificate
Run this cmdlet to verify the certificate thumbprintGet-AuthConfig | FT currentcertificate*,previouscert*
Now you can deploy your solution to IIS, update your manifest to point to the IIS server (do not forget the HTTPS) and then install it on the Exchange Server Control Panel (ECP) under the Organization / Add-ins option as a mandatory add-in.
Finally, and this last bit is important: IF USING OUTLOOK 2013 or OUTLOOK 2016, YOU MUST BE LOGGED INTO WINDOWS ON THE SAME DOMAIN AS YOUR EMAIL. I know, I know… for some folks this sucks. I have reported this to our product team and they are looking into it. If you are not logged into the same domain controller as your email address is registered, you will not see the advertised add-in. It will load in Outlook Web Access (OWA), but will not appear in Outlook 2013/2016. The exact cause of this problem is unknown, but hopefully it will be addressed in a future version of the product (Exchange or Outlook or both).
Setting up for 100% on-premises is difficult, but it CAN be done. There are a lot of steps, but if you follow the above prescription, you should get it to work. In time, I hope to see this process get easier. But in an online world where Microsoft Office 365 and Azure are main focus, “old fashioned” on-premises solutions are going to require a little more elbow grease.
NOTE: This entry was contributed to by Arthel Bibbens (MSFT) / Exchange PFE. You can follow his posts on this topic here:
I recently worked with a developer to deploy an Office add-in within an Exchange 2013 on-premises environment. This project highlighted a capability of Exchange and Outlook that is a huge shift in the way mail add-ins are developed, deployed, and maintained. Let’s take a look at the key components of Exchange 2013 that support this…
I have a customer that does not approve of build add-ins that point to the Internet. They want to develop a JavaScript Add-in for Office, but they cannot have it point to and download files from the Content Delivery Network (CDN). So we are forced to just point to the offline copies of the Office.js libraries. However, the version that ships with the default Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 install is version 1.1.0.9. And because we cannot use the NuGet packager in Visual Studio, from their network (because it was blocked), it forced me to get the files a different way. So, I got to a machine where I could use the command line NuGet tool. I placed this in a folder called C:\apps and opened a command prompt (cmd.exe). From there I typed in the commands:
[code language=”powershell”]
cd c:\apps
nuget.exe install Microsoft.Office.js
[/code]
As of this writing (updated on May 8th, 2017) this created a folder in the C:\Apps folder called Microsoft.Office.js.1.1.0.12. That was it. Simple. I then pulled over those files as a zip to the customer project a installed them.
NOTE: The NuGet version of the Office.js libraries are not necessarily the newest. The latest are always available on the CDN, however there is not a way to pull those copies down for a local version. The NuGet version is updated with each point release, but it will lag at some interval behind what is available on CDN.
