Why is it unnecessary to invoke Office.onReady() for event based addins?

[LiamWarnes]

I had a smart alert in my add in that was not working in Outlook Classic because code was being invoked inside Office.onReady(). This is in accordance with the documentation provided here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/outlook/autolaunch

This is a little confusing because it conflicts with guidance from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/develop/initialize-add-in that suggests onReady is necessary to invoke Office JS API's. Clearly, from the smart alert example provided here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/outlook/smart-alerts-onmessagesend-walkthrough?tabs=jsonmanifest office JS API's are being invoked without predecessor of onReady().

Could you please provide extended clarification in the top documentation as to why it is unnecessary to invoke onReady in this context?

[samantharamon]

Hi @LiamWarnes,

Thanks for reaching out. Office.onReady is only supported in the browser runtime. The code inside the Office.onReady function doesn't run in classic Outlook on Windows because the platform handles events in a JavaScript-only runtime (versus a browser runtime used by other supported platforms). As you suggested, I'll clarify this further in our documentation.

[LiamWarnes]

@samantharamon id just like to note that in testing if you are developing for OWA you have to put Office.actions.associate inside the onReady() or the handler will not bind, and then in Outlook classic you need to put the associate Outside the Office.onReady()

assuming you want to keep the same JS file for both the WebView and JS runtime for all platforms, this does not work very intuitively....

[samantharamon]

Thanks, @LiamWarnes. Let me see how we can document this behavior better.