Office.context.mailbox.item.inReplyTo is not available on item being composed in Outlook

[cody-lettau]

Provide required information needed to triage your issue

The new Office.context.mailbox.item.inReplyTo property is not available on an item being composed in reply to an item or when forwarding an item.

Your Environment

• Platform [PC desktop, Mac, iOS, Office on the web]: OWA
• Host [Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.]: Outlook
• Browser (if using Office on the web): Chrome

Expected behavior

I would expect that the parent message id value is available on this property (Office.context.mailbox.item.inReplyTo).

Current behavior

The property does not exist on the item, resulting in undefined if used. This was seen in OWA (did not test on Windows or Mac).

Steps to reproduce

1. Click to reply to an existing message.
2. In an on-send or compose add-in, check Office.context.mailbox.item.inReplyTo for the parent id.

Provide additional details

1. I would like to know if this should be expected to work in an on-premise Exchange environment if the user is using a Windows Desktop client (as long as the client platform/version says it supports Mailbox 1.14 req set, even if Exchange On-prem says up to 1.5 req set only)?

Context

Add-ins need the ability to easily get the message id of the item being replied to or forwarded. Relying on Rest/Graph/EWS is not sufficient as it takes time for the item to be synced to Exchange and then it takes multiple calls to actually get the correct/usable ID (I have tried this using EWS as I have an on-prem requirement).

[github-actions]

Here are some similar issues that might help you. Please check if they can solve your problem.

• ConversationId is 'null' in new OWA even on reply #636
• inReplyTo property of the compose message is empty on Outlook for Mac #4786
• Mailbox item is undefined in compose mode (macOS Client 16.85) #4538
• Office.context.mailbox.item undefined when switching between inline replies with pinned task pane #2295
• Item doesn't contain item id in On send event for Office JS Outlook #624

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Possible solution (Extracted from existing issue, might be incorrect; please verify carefully)

Solution 1:

Thanks for linking the docs, as suggested, we now check for the presence of Item in the change handler.

Reference:

• Office.context.mailbox.item undefined when switching between inline replies with pinned task pane #2295 (comment)

Solution 2:

I believe this is the default behavior in Desktop Outlook, for which we have documented a guideline to always check for null before doing any work in the ItemChanged event handler, on this page.

Reference:

• Office.context.mailbox.item undefined when switching between inline replies with pinned task pane #2295 (comment)

[whoanuragverma]

Can you provide more details about the environment setup?

1. Are you using new outlook or classic outlook?
2. What version of Exchange on-prem are you using?
3. How did you add your on-prem account to Outlook?

As per our docs inReplyTo is supported in requirement set 1.14 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/javascript/api/outlook/office.messagecompose?view=outlook-js-1.14&preserve-view=true#outlook-office-messagecompose-inreplyto-member) and Exchange on-prem only supports upto 1.5

[cody-lettau]

@whoanuragverma my initial testing was using OWA and it still did not work there either.

For on-prem, my testing was in new outlook using Exchange 2019 SE. The add-in deployed via an admin.

In regards to the docs, my understanding is that even though the Exchange server states it only supports up to v1.5, that if a client with support for newer requirement sets is used, there is a chance that some of the functionality will work. I'm pretty sure there are definitely cases of this being true.

In general though, it is absolutely ridiculous that on-prem doesn't support anything newer than what was available in 2017 (8 years ago). How can Microsoft be pushing add-in development and not update their on-premise support for that long?

[neprasad-microsoft]

Hi @cody-lettau
We looked into this issue and this API has some dependencies on the server because of which it cannot be supported on onPrem. As an alternative, you can use EWS APIs to get this property for onPrem-https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.exchange.webservices.data.item.inreplyto?view=exchange-ews-api .

[cody-lettau]

@neprasad-microsoft I can understand that it has dependencies on the server. That said, documentation should definitely highlight this lack of support for on-prem environments.

But the main issue here is that I also saw the same issue when trying to use it in OWA.

[neprasad-microsoft]

Sure @cody-lettau , we would like to update our docs if it was missed. But I think for this property it is documented that this is available after 1.14 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/javascript/api/outlook/office.messagecompose?view=outlook-js-1.14&preserve-view=true#outlook-office-messagecompose-inreplyto-member
Do you mean some other documentation?

When you say OWA, do you mean On-Prem OWA or Exchange Online? In case of On-Prem, OWA will have the same limitations.

[cody-lettau]

@neprasad-microsoft I mean OWA using Exchange Online. This feature does not appear to work anywhere. This bug should not be closed.

[DivyaPatidar]

@cody-lettau We are unable to reproduce this issue on our end. Could you please provide the following details to help us investigate further?

1. A video demonstrating the issue.
2. Logs collected using the steps mentioned here
3. A sample add-in where you can reproduce the issue.

Please create a private Git repository and share the files. Please grant access to @exextoc.

[microsoft-github-policy-service]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it is marked as needing author feedback but has not had any activity for 4 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 3 days of this comment. Thank you for your interest in Office Add-ins!