Shared Folder is missing in the Office My Addin ribbon suddenly in Angular Office Addin Project

Question

I am currently working with an office word addin using Angular, and I had already sideload my office addin as documented in this post. And I was able to add them from the Insert Menu -> My Add-ins ribbon, by opening the Shared Folder menu. My issue is that, all of a sudden the Shared Folder menu is not visible anymore.

Please be noted that I had already tried the refresh button on the right corner. I have also tried sideload the add in again, by creating a new shared folder. But nothing helped. Have you ever faced this issue?

Answer 1

After scratching my head for a few minutes, I was able to fix this. The issue was related to a recent change in the manifest.xml file. In the manifest.xml file, under the Resources section, we have <bt:Urls>, that is where we provide the Urls. Below is the Url which was causing the issue.

<bt:Url id="Taskpane.Url" DefaultValue="https://localhost:3000">

Please be noted that there is no closing / at the end of this Url. Once I add that to the Url, everything started working fine.

<bt:Url id="Taskpane.Url" DefaultValue="https://localhost:3000" />

I believe that, this is something that should be fixed, it should work as it is, even though there is no closing. What do you think?

Answer 2

I want to make a separate answer cause I think other people should be aware, considering the 3 hours I lost with this.

The taskpane button was missing from the ribbon because the manifest.xml was not a valid XML manifest.

Therefore, before committing/publishing the manifest, always validate it. If you're using npm, run

npm validate

which is a shorthand for

office-addin-manifest validate manifest.xml