Release notes for apps for Office

Parity between Outlook clients

One of the design pillars for apps for Office is write-once. The same calls from your mail app to the JavaScript API for Office should work seamlessly and transparently for all Outlook clients: the Outlook rich client and Outlook Web App. The following list describes the features and APIs that do not currently support write-once and may work differently than documented:

• Attachment support in mail apps

  Mail apps can now send a web service an authentication token and attachment identifier to enable the web service to retrieve the attachment from the Exchange server. The following object and members now support attachments in mail apps:

  • AttachmentDetails object and members

  • Item.attachments property

  • Mailbox.ewsUrl property

  • Mailbox.getCallbackTokenAsync method

  • AttachmentType enumeration

  Note
  Currently, the attachments API and callback tokens are available to mail apps that run on Outlook Web App, but not on the Outlook rich client.

• Message.conversationId returns different values in Outlook and Outlook Web App

  In the Outlook rich client, the conversationId property of a Message object returns the value of the MAPI property PidTagConversationId. In Outlook Web App, the conversationId property returns the Exchange Web Services conversation ID. Take note if your scenario requires this property, for example passing the Exchange Web Services conversation ID to call an Exchange Web Service.

  For more information about the Exchange Web Services conversation ID, see the following:

  • As a member of the Exchange Web Services managed API: Id()

  • As an Exchange Web Services XML element: ConversationId

Adding a binding to a named content control in Word may fail

In Word, if there are content controls in both the main document and a subdocument (for example, textbox, header, footer), or in multiple subdocuments, attempting to use the Bindings.addFromNamedItemAsync method to bind to another control in that document may fail as if there was a name collision.

Reading table data as a "text" coercion type may return unexpected characters past the null terminator

In Word, if you use the Document.getSelectedDataAsync method to read the selected data from a table and specify the "text" coercion type, you should ignore the characters after the null-terminator in the returned data, if it's present.

Partial writing to a table may fail

If you are doing partial writing to tables, don’t include header data to get the best results. Because of a known issue, partial writing by calling the Binding.setDataAsync method with the "table" coercion type may fail if the operation includes the last row of the table. To work around this, specify null for the header array in the TableData object that is passed to the data parameter in the setDataAsync method call.

Writing to a table may fail

If you are doing full writing to tables, include header data to get the best results. Because of a known issue, partial reading using the Binding.getDataAsync method or writing by calling the Binding.setDataAsync method with the "table" coercion type may not set all the rows of the table correctly if the header row is null. To work around this, specify data for the header array in the TableData object that is passed as an argument to the setDataAsync method.

Events for custom XML parts may not fire reliably in Word

In Word, changes to a custom XML node (such as deleting, adding, or replacing a node) does not always fire the corresponding nodeDeleted, nodeInserted, or nodeReplaced event. There will be a fix shortly after Office 2013 is available to the general public. Meanwhile, instead of using the events for a custom XML node, consider using the bindingSelectionChanged and bindingDataChanged events if binding to a content control is relevant to your scenario.

For example, if you are creating a custom template where there is a repeating section content control for which you would like to listen events, you can select that content, insert a rich text content control to embed the content in that control. Using the Word user interface, assign a name to the Title property of the rich text content control. Then use the addFromNamedItemAsync method of the Bindings object to add a binding to the rich text content control using that name. With a binding in place, you can now use the bindingSelectionChanged or bindingDataChanged event to determine if you should check for changes in the custom XML part that the repeating content control is bound to.

Because the bindingSelectionChanged and bindingDataChanged events cannot provide any context information about which custom XML part changed, you’ll need to manually track the state to determine changes. Also keep in mind that dependence on nested content controls is not as reliable because users can change the structure of their document.