How to get username, email address, filename from task pane app

Question

I cam trying to get the following information from the task pane app (Office Add-ins):

1. User information ie. username, email address
2. Filename of the current open document

I'm currently developing an task pane add in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as an Outlook app. Please advise.

Answer 1

Single sign-on (SSO) was released in developer preview last week. As part of the system, your add-in gets a token from the Office host application that contains a "preferred_username" property. The value of the property is the email of the user logged into Office.

There is an overview at Enable single sign-on for Office add-ins (preview).

There are two samples:

Office-Add-in-ASPNET-SSO

Office-Add-in-Nodejs-SSO

In both samples, the add-in also uses the token received from Office host to get an access token to Microsoft Graph, but your add-in doesn't have to take that extra step.

I don't know of any way of getting the user identity without using SSO.

Answer 2

There is no way to get the username/email from Word/Excel/PowerPoint. You can in Outlook via Office.context.mailbox.userProfile

Likewise, filename doesn't make sense from Outlook, but you can get document.url and document.getFilePropertiesAsync from the others (not sure but I expect document.url is the value when the document or add-in was loaded while getFilePropertiesAsync would be more up to date).

Answer 3

There is currently no Office API that allows you to retrieve the user info. However, you could always use Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to get the user's identity. Even though it's not perfect, it should work. Feel free to request an API for that on the Office Extensibility Platform's UserVoice.