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Our Outlook add-in is used for thousands of clients but recently it has started to fail for a handful of clients. We are afraid this is a growing issue. This is a paid service and the clients must install the add-in manifest manually as we have not made it available through App Source. The reason is that the URL for the add-in contains an id unique for each client used for simple authentication.

So the source location in the manifest file looks something like this:

https://ourcompany.com/home/index/[clientId]?someparam=abc

The problem we are seeing is that OWA makes one request and one request only to https://ourcompany.com/ when the user opens the add-in sidepanel. It never makes any requests for the correct URL given in the manifest.

So far we have been unable to reproduce the error on our own end, and we see no problems with the manifest files used by the clients.

Is this a known thing with add-ins? In what cases would OWA request the root authority for an add-in source location?

Update

Here are some screenshots from the browser's "Network" tab. The first one shows what it is supposed to look like when all is good. The second one is from an imported .HAR file sent to me by one of the clients where it is going awry. As you can see, OWA requests the root of our site and the client ID and all query parameters are stripped away.

Good

enter image description here

Bad

enter image description here

Eugene Astafiev
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Jakob Christensen
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  • We are unable to repro this at our end. Are you checking the URL in browser's dev tools "Network" tab? Also is it possible for you to share network trace in case of failure? – Outlook Add-ins Team - MSFT Feb 28 '23 at 11:41
  • What do users see in Outlook in that case? Does this problem exist in Outlook for desktop for the same users? – Eugene Astafiev Feb 28 '23 at 16:55
  • @OutlookAdd-insTeam-MSFT: Yes, I have been unable to repro myself. I added screenshots from the browser dev tools to the question. – Jakob Christensen Feb 28 '23 at 17:11
  • @EugeneAstafiev: Users see whatever we put at the root of the site. Now we just put an error page, but before that the would get an HTTP not found error. The error shows in both OWA and desktop. – Jakob Christensen Feb 28 '23 at 17:12
  • Sounds like a bug in Outlook/OfficeJS, I suppose we expirience something similar to that in Outlook for desktop on the customer side, but we were not able to reproduce it locally. I'd suggest posting this as a bug to https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js/issues . And I will join to the discussion. – Eugene Astafiev Feb 28 '23 at 17:17
  • @JakobChristensen Is it possible for you to share following details to OutlookExtensibility@M365x27035562.onmicrosoft.com : 1. Network trace when it works. 2. Network trace when it does not work.(You can share the traces shared by your client) 3. Addin with which you collected these network trace. – Outlook Add-ins Team - MSFT Mar 01 '23 at 06:42
  • @OutlookAdd-insTeam-MSFT, sorry for not getting back to you. Some clients have reported back that the add-in is now running without any problems. We did not change anything, so I can't say what happened and why it started working again. We are waiting for others to report back. Thanks. – Jakob Christensen Mar 06 '23 at 14:00

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