CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ms-officeoffice-jsexcel-addinsms-office-addin
Nick
Nick

Reputation: 51

Question about auto opening Excel web workbook task pane

I'm working on a Excel JavaScript task pane. I inherited this project so a lot of the basic infrastructure was already built out when I started working on this. I've got a working development environment where I manually side-load my Excel add-in from the XML manifest file on my dev system. When I do this and I open an Excel workbook, the add-in icon appears in the ribbon and the task pane auto loads as I want it to. So far all good.

I've followed the instructions to enable the task pane auto-load from here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/develop/automatically-open-a-task-pane-with-a-document and here https://github.com/OfficeDev/Office-OOXML-EmbedAddin/blob/master/README.md, and this has worked great during my development process.

So now I wanted to test deploying this add-in via the Microsoft Admin center and Integrated Apps. I setup my add-in on its own server and confirmed I can bring up the task pane. I also modified the manifest file to point to this new server. I successfully uploaded my Manifest (updated to point to the new publishing server) and assigned the published application to a test user. When I login with the test user account and open an Excel workbook I see my add-in in the ribbon, but the task pane doesn't automatically open as it does in my dev setup.

I've reviewed all the docs and samples, but I can't seem to figure out why the task pane isn't auto loading in the production environment.

I'm wondering if the issue is related to the information I'm adding to the workbooks that I'm using.

Using the OpenXmlFileViewer tool, I can see the following is in one of the workbooks I'm using


  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
  <we:webextension xmlns:we="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/webextensions/webextension/2010/11" id="{747863CA-D79B-40BB-B204-EC5A53D3EADB}">
    <we:reference id="6aef3647-b866-4164-83c9-b2e7c3af4b5b" version="1.0.0.0" store="developer" storeType="uploadfiledevcatalog" />
    <we:alternateReferences>
      <we:reference id="6aef3647-b866-4164-83c9-b2e7c3af4b5b" version="1.0.0.0" store="omex" storeType="omex" />
    </we:alternateReferences>
    <we:properties>
      <we:property name="Office.AutoShowTaskpaneWithDocument" value="true" />
    </we:properties>
    <we:bindings />
    <we:snapshot xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships" />
    <we:extLst>
      <a:ext xmlns:a="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main" uri="{D87F86FE-615C-45B5-9D79-34F1136793EB}">
        <we:containsCustomFunctions />
      </a:ext>
    </we:extLst>
  </we:webextension>

And from my manifest file I have this


  <Action xsi:type="ShowTaskpane">
    <!-- <TaskpaneId>ButtonId1</TaskpaneId> -->
    <TaskpaneId>Office.AutoShowTaskpaneWithDocument</TaskpaneId>
    <SourceLocation resid="Taskpane.Url"/>
  </Action>

This is the section that I believe is supposed to trigger the autoloading of the task pane. From my manifest file, the ID is 6aef3647-b866-4164-83c9-b2e7c3af4b5b which I can see being correctly added to the Excel file.

What I'm wondering is if the values I have for the store and storetype would be causing the add-in to not auto-load?

Also, I can't seem to find any documentation on what the

<we:webextension xmlns:we="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/webextensions/webextension/2010/11" id="{747863CA-D79B-40BB-B204-EC5A53D3EADB}"> id is meant for and what the line <a:ext xmlns:a="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main" uri="{D87F86FE-615C-45B5-9D79-34F1136793EB}">

uri is meant for?

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 114

Answers (1)

Nick
Nick

Reputation: 51

I was able to figure out my own question after some experimenting.

In my case since I had deployed my task pane app to the Microsoft 365 admin center I had to use "EXCatalog" as the store and store type. This comes from the Microsoft link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/develop/automatically-open-a-task-pane-with-a-document

The XML in my workbook looks like this:

id="6aef3647-b866-4164-83c9-b2e7c3af4b5b" version="1.0.0.0" store="EXCatalog" storeType="EXCatalog"

Upvotes: 2

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