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I'm having trouble trying to side-load an add-in in MS Word, getting the error 'ADD-IN ERROR: A problem occured while trying to reach this add-in.' The add-in needs to be hosted on a local docker environment to be integrated in the rest of a web aplication.

Setup

The add-in files are hosted on a local docker machine, accessible through both an ip-address and a https://dev.local address. The add-in is reachable through Internet Explorer and Edge Chromium without any certificate errors. It doesn't matter whether I try to reach the IP address of the locally mapped dev.local, the add-in refuses to load and just crashes. I'm on Word version 2002 build 12527.20194. Another word-addin that we host externally works fine.

What i've tried

  • I've been messing around with the settings in Internet Explorer (moving the sites to local zone, trusted zone, enabling and disabling the protection there).
  • I've upgraded Edge to edge Chromium. I've tried to use the Preview of Edge Developer Tools, but that crashes when the error occurs.
  • I've tried using Fiddler and activate the runtime logging, but can't get more information on what's going wrong.
  • I've used the Yoman validation on the manifest.xml and everything checks out.
  • I've also enabled loopback through CheckNetIsolation LoopbackExempt -a -n="microsoft.win32webviewhost_cw5n1h2txyewy"

I'm pretty much at a loss now: what can I do to get more information on what's crashing the add-in?

T. Altena
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1 Answers1

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OK so I managed to finally get this to work, leaving this here for anyone who might run into the same issues.

Because the local sideloading did work, I figured we needed to emulate the localhost situation with the docker. So I instructed the virtual machine to forward localhost:3000 to the Docker Toolbox port 443. I also copied over the SSL certificates generated by Yoman in <userhome>/.office-addin-dev-certs to the Nginx docker and instructed Nginx to use those SSL certificates for port 443.

I'm not entirely sure if adapting all of the other settings (such as enabling the loopback interface and using the about:flags page to always allow https on localhost are also neccesary, maybe just emulating the webserver on localhost is enough. Hope this helps someone!

T. Altena
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