Selenium Unable to Interact with Taskpane Elements in Outlook Add-in

[Shivneel-Prksh]

I'm using Selenium and Chrome WebDriver to automate UI testing for a taskpane-based Outlook add-in. While Selenium can interact with the main Outlook web app, it fails to locate or interact with elements inside the taskpane when opened. This issue prevents me from retrieving element properties (e.g., textContent, innerHTML) and running automated UI tests.

Expected Behavior

When using Selenium to automate UI testing for a taskpane-based Outlook add-in, I expect to:

• Open the Outlook web app.
• Launch the taskpane add-in.
• Use JavaScript through Selenium to locate elements in the taskpane and retrieve their properties (e.g., textContent, innerHTML).

Current Behavior

Selenium is able to:

• Launch the Outlook web app.
• Navigate and interact with elements outside the taskpane. However:
• When the taskpane is opened, Selenium is unable to locate or interact with the elements inside it using JavaScript.
• Attempts to retrieve properties like textContent and innerHTML of taskpane elements fail or return null/undefined.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Launch the Outlook web app using Selenium and Chrome WebDriver.
2. Open the taskpane-based add-in.
3. Use Selenium to execute JavaScript to locate elements in the taskpane iframe and retrieve their properties.
4. Observe that element interactions or property retrieval do not work.

Context

This issue blocks automation of UI testing for the taskpane-based Outlook add-in, making it challenging to verify element properties and run UI automated tests. The inability to interact with taskpane elements via JavaScript affects:

• UI validation during testing.

Your Environment

• Platform: PC Desktop
• Host: Outlook Web (OWA)
• Office Version Number: N/A
• Operating System: Windows 11
• Browser: Chrome (latest stable version)

[megharai1302]

Thanks @Shivneel-Prksh for reporting & sharing the details. Could you please provide the following details to help us investigate further:

1. Does this not work for your add-in or any taskpane add-in?
2. Is this something that has worked before?

[Shivnil]

Hi @megharai1302,

Thank you for your questions!

1. This issue occurs with all taskpane add-ins, not just this specific one. None of the taskpane content can be accessed using Selenium.
2. In the previous version of this add-in, we used dialogs to display prompts. Initially, we faced the same issue with accessing dialog content, but when we set displayInIframe property to false, we were able to access the content and execute JavaScript scripts.

It seems like the iframe-based rendering is the root cause of these access issues, but I’d appreciate any guidance or workarounds for this situation.