Microsoft Teams deep link to staticTab only opens the tab with the default URL from manifest

Question

We tried to deep link a Microsoft Teams static Tab from a card which is sent by a bot.

The link to the tab works but then the Tab only shows the default page which is defined in the App manifest file. The webURL parameter has no effect.

This is the link:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/entity/"appid"/"tabid"?webUrl=https%3a%2f%2fexample.com&label=Bliblablubb&context=%7b%22subEntityId%22%3a%22test%22%7d

I would expect that the Tab shows the website example.com. This is not the case here.

Of course we listed our domain in the "validDomains" section in the manifest.json

Has anyone an idea?

Answer 1

Please see the "Generating a deep link to your tab" section of Create deep links. As it states there, webUrl is a "fallback URL to use if the client does not support rendering the tab".

This means that if, as an example, Microsoft implement a "smart tv" version of Teams, but it doesn't handle deeplinks properly, it will fall back to opening that web url. If, however, the client is able to render the tab itself (e.g. desktop, web, android app, etc.), it will try do so, and it will render what it knows about, which is what you refer to as "the default page which is defined in the App manifest file".

Answer 2

entitywebUrl is an optional field in your deeplink URL which will render if the client on which you are running, does not support the rendering of your tab. So the webURL does have an effect but when the client cannot render the actual link as described here.