In this article I will demonstrate how to use a regular expression to provide dynamic contexual assignment of an Outlook add-in. Using that regular expression we will be able to identify the necessary information to link the Add-In to some external dynamic workflow functionality.

Introduction

During the Collab365 presentation I demonstrated a workflow application which was a simple vacation request approval. In that demonstration I showed how we are able to detect a unique key inside of an email and then use that value to open the workflow within the add in (https://youtu.be/t6kRFV09TYs?t=1950).

In previous articles I have demonstrated how to create a contextual add-in and in this article we will look at how we can take that up a notch and make the context dynamic and useful.

I am going to demonstrate the capability in the context of a napacloud add-in so that you are able to work along.

Messing with RegEx

Regular Expressions are a weird an wonderfully powerful capability, generally reserved for people way smarter than me to figure out. Fortunately there are many example sites which can be used to help you figure out how you should build your regular expression.

I used http://scriptular.com/ which allowed me to test my regular expression until I made it work.

We need to create a unique key within out email so that it can be picked up by Outlook. We cannot use an existing URL though because there is already functionality associated with that.

Using regular expressions in an Office Add-in

Inside of the napacloud tooling we are able to play with adding a regular expression to the context of the Add-In.

So I insert my regular expression into the box, save and run. In this case (for demonstration I make the number of characters fixed to be 6)

Test Email

I created a simple test email with a few expressions which COULD match……and when the Add-In runs – only only of the links is highlighted

So now what?

Well what we want to happen is when the user clock on that Workflow Id: Ac9sXP link we want to take them to the right page within our Application (surfaced through the Add-In).

Within the Office.initialize we are able to determine functionality which happens when the user selects the Add-In. I used the same regular expression to match the desired Workflow Id

Office.initialize = function (reason) {
        $(document).ready(function () {
            Office.context.mailbox.item.body.getAsync(
		  "text",
		  { asyncContext:"This is passed to the callback" },
		  function callback(result) {
		    // Do something with the result
			var str = result.value; 
			var res = str.match(/Workflow\sId:\s[0-9|a-z|A-Z]{6}/g).toString();      				
			$("#content-main").html("The RegEx matched is---> "+res)
		  });
        });
    };

When you run the sample in the browser you get this

More advanced

Once you have this string in JavaScript you can do a number of things with it, the two most obvious to me are:

• Create an iFrame within the application and add the WorkflowID to the Query String
• If you have an angular application you can then route the user to the correct document using the WorkflowID

Conclusion

In this article I showed how to create a contextual addin using a semi-complex Regular Expression. Then using that exposed value from the email we can surface dynamic functionality for the user.

The Code

I have posted the code from this sample napacloud out on GitHub for anyone who wants to download it an play with it

You can find it here:

https://github.com/markyroden/RegExInOutlookAddIn