Tag: outlook

Autolaunch and Outlook on Windows

David E. CraigLeave a comment

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.

Enter Smart Events, and with it specifically the OnMessageSend event. The adventure began…

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()
  • stop using async/await, and built pyramids of doom
  • stopped using Promises() even

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:

/**
* Ensures the Office.js library is loaded.
*/
Office.onReady((info) => {
/**
* Maps the event handler name specified in the manifest's LaunchEvent element to its JavaScript counterpart.
* This ensures support in Outlook on Windows.
*/
if (Office.context.platform === Office.PlatformType.PC || Office.context.platform == null) {
Office.actions.associate("onMessageSendHandler", onMessageSendHandler);
}
});
view raw onready.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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:

/**
* Checks to see if we are running in Windows Outlook
* @returns {Boolean}
*/
function isPC() {
try {
if (Office.context.platform === Office.PlatformType.PC || Office.context.platform === null) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
} catch {
return false;
}
}
if (isPC() === true) {
Office.actions.associate("onMessageSendHandler", onMessageSendHandler);
} else {
Office.onReady(function () {});
// Everything below is for OTHER (non-PC) clients per older constructs. Not certain
// if any of this is needed except for COMMANDS (rather than EVENTS), so eventually
// if commands are added, we have this in place…
var g = getGlobal();
// The add-in command functions need to be available in global scope
g.onMessageSendHandler = onMessageSendHandler; // on send event
}
/**
* OnSend event triggered
* @param {Office.AddinCommands.Event} event
*/
function onMessageSendHandler(event) {
Office.onReady(function () {});
Office.context.mailbox.item.body.getAsync(Office.CoercionType.Text, { asyncContext: event }, function (asyncResult) {
var body = asyncResult.value;
var event = asyncResult.asyncContext;
// … more code here …
});
}
view raw commands.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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.

Outlook Signature Add-in

David E. CraigLeave a comment

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.

Hopefully, this version is a bit easier to follow for those that develop in a more modern ES6 style.

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. 😁

Outlook Calendar for Trello is Released

David E. CraigLeave a comment

I have really enjoyed writing this bit of code because it stretched from Trello API to Office 365 API, two of my favorite programming interfaces. This Power-Up is similar to the default Trello Calendar Power-up, the key difference being is that it connects to your Outlook Calendar. So, you can see all your Trello Tasks and your Outlook appointments/meetings, side by side in one place, you can link your appointments to Trello cards and vice-versa. With a month view and a weekly view, you can manage your calendar easily by dragging and dropping your Trello Cards on the calendar to create linked appointments for specific tasks all in one place.

Check it out here:

https://trello.com/power-ups/637307154b117e05a423c8a1

New Outlook Add-in: Send to Trello

David E. Craig2 Comments

I have been using Trello for a while now and one of the features I have found most useful is to take an email I received and turn it into a Kanban item on my backlog to address later. This allows me to archive the email but keeps it on my “Trello radar” as I work at my own pace through my personal backlog.

Recently, Trello removed their add-in from the Microsoft Office store. If you have the add-in installed, you will see this error:

Well, since they say necessity is the mother of all invention and I really had to fill the gap as it is part of my routine, I rolled my own. 🤓 To add a degree of difficulty, I wrote this in VS Code in Linux running in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). See my previous post. It was a fun exercise as I am on vacation and using the time tom learn new things, engage in self-improvement and relax (coding is relaxing to me 🤓🤓🤓). In the end, I learned something and created something for everyone to enjoy.

Say hello to the recently published: Send to Trello Outlook Add-in.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Disabling your Web Add-in if you have an Equivalent COM/VSTO Add-in

David E. Craig3 Comments

In previous post, I described how you can add code to your VSTO/COM add-in to disable your Web Add-in loaded from maniferst via the Office Portal:
Removing Web Add-in Ribbon Customization in Outlook for Windows (theofficecontext.com)

Well with Outlook for Windows, Office 365, version 16.0.13728.36136, you can now disable your Web Add-in via Policy settings.

Download Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) and Office Customization Tool for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Office 2019, and Office 2016 from Official Microsoft Download Center

Here is the path in the policy editor for this setting:

Once in the policy editor, you would set the value. If your OfficeJS Web Add-in has a GUID of {c5bc7737-0d79-4302-9e73-2a614941e914} and the COM add-in is called “My Full Featured Outlook Add-in“, you would set the values like this:

Specifically, the registry key it puts in place is this:

PATH: HKCU\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\addins\equivalentcomaddin
KEY (string/REG_SZ): {OfficeJS GUID}
VALUE: Prog.ID

For example, if I have an Outlook Web Add-in called “My Outlook Add-in” and it has the following manifest entry:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OfficeApp 
          xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/appforoffice/1.1" 
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
          xmlns:bt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/officeappbasictypes/1.0" 
          xmlns:mailappor="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/mailappversionoverrides/1.0" 
          xsi:type="MailApp">
	<Id>c5bc7737-0d79-4302-9e73-2a614941e914</Id>

Let’s say I have a full VSTO add-in called “My Full Featured Outlook Add-in” and it is registered as the following:

If you were to look at the Policy key after it is set you would have an entry like this:

KEY: {c5bc7737-0d79-4302-9e73-2a614941e914}
VALUE: My Full Featured Outlook Add-in

If it were an older traditional COM Add-in, like the top item: AccessAddin.DC, then it would look like this:

KEY: {c5bc7737-0d79-4302-9e73-2a614941e914}
VALUE: AccessAddin.DC

That is all you have to do if you have the newest builds of Outlook for Windows. 

NOTE: Coming later in the year, will be an option to add this entry to your Web Add-in Manifest file the way you can with Excel and Word. 
NOTE: This is all covered in the latest Office add-ins community call.

easyEws Updated to 1.0.20

David E. Craig2 Comments

This was more than a patch this time. It was a minor update to two functions:

  • sendMailItem
  • sendPlainTextEmailWithAttachment

There was an issue reported (#12) where the sendMailItem function was not working in IE11. This was because it was created to take an inline object (ES6). Well on IE11 (which only supports ES5), it broke.

So, I fixed sendMailItem to support ES5 and also took the opportunity to add two often requested features of this function:

  • It will now allow you to submit HTML body content or Text. It will also parse the HTML for you if you submit it as is.
  • It will also now allow you to send both file attachment (new), and mail item attachments (original).

Please see the documentation for more information on the updates to this function: https://github.com/davecra/easyEWS#sendMailItem

Also I updated the sendPlainTextEmailWithAttachment function. Under the covers this uses the sendMailItem function. So I had to update it to use the new format so it would work as well. There was no change to it’s features/functionality however.

I did not get to the last item I have had requests for:

  • ability to specify recipients as To/CC/BCC. I will update this at some future date. Also, please let me know if you would like to see this.

Overall, the goal is to have the sendMailItem() function be a full multi-purpose function at some point. It is almost there, but please keep the suggestions coming.

easyEws v1.0.19 Released

David E. CraigLeave a comment

There were a couple small bug fixes in the splitGroupsRecursivelyAsync() function. Thank you to Jack for making me aware of the issue as it has now been corrected.

The CDN to the latest versioned instance of the library:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/easyews/easyEws1.0.19.js

Here is a link to my GitHub:

https://github.com/davecra/easyEWS

And it is also able to be installed from NPM with the command:

npm install easyews

Script Lab for Outlook. Yeah!

David E. CraigLeave a comment

OMG! This is a day I have been waiting for.

I do a LOT of Outlook Web Add-in development. A lot. I have made the move from Visual Studio to Visual Studio Code, from C# to JavaScript and have not looked back. However, there are a few things that make development in this new area difficult and that is rapid prototyping.

For C#, I could always go into VBA and see how the object model would behave when I needed to test a hypothesis. I was able to use VBA as a laboratory for ideas before I codified them into solid C# code in a VSTO Add-in. But there was no such laboratory in the JavaScript web add-in world, until now…

…Script Lab for Outlook has been released. And the best part, it is available in Outlook on Windows, Outlook on Mac and Outlook on the web!

Script Lab in Outlook for Windows
Script Lab for OWA

If you do a lot of Outlook development this will be a godsend. You will now be able to go into Script Lab and test your code ideas before you add them to your more complex add-in.

Open Outlook, go into the Office Store and type “Script Lab” and Script Lab for Outlook should come up in your list. Select and install it. Then open a message in Outlook and you should see the Script Lab items on the Home tab.

Happy coding!

Detecting Print in Outlook (VSTO/C#)

David E. Craig1 Comment

This is a common problem in Outlook. You might have tried to override the Ribbon settings for Print in Outlook to find that your code never gets run when the user clicks Print.

There is also not any events in the Outlook object model to detect Print either. So if you need to detect the user pressing the print button, you are out of luck.

While it is still not possible to detect the print button being pressed, you can at least detect when the user has selected the Print tab on the backstage.

The following code uses a background thread and a series of Windows API calls to FindWindow/FindWindowEx to detect when the Print tab on the backstage is opened:

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
public static extern IntPtr FindWindow(string lpClassName, string lpWindowName);
[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
public static extern IntPtr FindWindowEx(IntPtr parentHandle, IntPtr childAfter, string className, string windowTitle);
/// <summary>
/// Startup for Outlook Add-in
/// </summary>
/// <param name="sender"></param>
/// <param name="e"></param>
private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
// we start by creating a background thread and look for a specific
// set of windows to appear, then we know the user clicked print
new Thread(() =>
{
while (true)
{
Thread.Sleep(1000);
CheckForPrint();
}
}).Start();
}
/// <summary>
/// Checks to see if the user has opened backstage and
/// selected the Print tab
/// </summary>
private void CheckForPrint()
{
try
{
// depending on whether we have an inspector active, or the explorer
// active we will need to get the caption to FindWindow
string LstrCaption = "";
if(Application.ActiveWindow() is Outlook.Inspector)
{
// Active inspector caption
LstrCaption = ((Outlook.Inspector)Application.ActiveWindow()).Caption;
}
else if(Application.ActiveWindow() is Outlook.Explorer)
{
// Active explorer caption
LstrCaption = ((Outlook.Explorer)Application.ActiveWindow()).Caption;
}
// get the window handle
IntPtr LintHostHandle = FindWindow(null, LstrCaption);
if (LintHostHandle == IntPtr.Zero) return; // if we cannot find it – nevermind
// create a list of windows to find (in reverse order)
// 4) rctrl_renwnd32 – is the print preview window
// 3) NetUICtrlNotifySink – is whole Print options and preview
// 2) NetUIHWND – is the the entire print tab
// 1) FullpageUIHost – is the backstage page
Stack<string> LobjWindowClasses = new Stack<string> (
new string[] { "rctrl_renwnd32", "NetUICtrlNotifySink", "NetUIHWND", "FullpageUIHost" });
// recursive call back to find each window in the stack.
// if all of them are found, then present a message to the user
if(FindWindowStack(LintHostHandle, LobjWindowClasses))
{
MessageBox.Show("You have clicked on the Print Tab in Outlook.");
}
}
catch { }
}
/// <summary>
/// RECURSIVE
/// This function will take the window classnames in the provided stack
/// and then find each one in order via recursive calls. If all of them
/// are found – we return true = found
/// </summary>
/// <param name="PintHandle"></param>
/// <param name="PobjStack"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
private bool FindWindowStack(IntPtr PintHandle, Stack<string> PobjStack)
{
try
{
// get the window with the classname being popped off the stack
IntPtr LintNewHandle = FindWindowEx(PintHandle, IntPtr.Zero, PobjStack.Pop(), "");
if(LintNewHandle != IntPtr.Zero && PobjStack.Count == 0)
{
return true; // found it
}
else if(LintNewHandle!= IntPtr.Zero)
{
// found a window, but the stack still has items, call next one
return FindWindowStack(LintNewHandle, PobjStack);
}
else
{
// did not find it
return false;
}
}
catch
{
// oops
return false;
}
}
view raw DetectUserPrintInOutlook.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub