Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

THE OFFICE JAVASCRIPT OBJECT MODEL

The Office JavaScript Object Model provides the ability for your web application and the Office host application to interact, and that’s where the creativity and innovation of your web-based solution can intersect with the creativity and innovation of the Office user.

You can think of Apps for Office in two ways: those that will interact with documents (document based) and those that will interact with mail items (mailbox based). At the time of this writing, document-based apps include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Project. The xsi:type TaskPaneApp and ContentApp are document-based apps for Office. The mailbox-based app, xsi:type MailApp, is, of course, associated with the Outlook rich client and companion Outlook Web App (OWA). Therefore, although the Office JSOM is a unified object model, due to the differences between the sheer nature of a document and a mailbox item, you will use different parts of the Office API depending on which Office applications your app for Office will target.

Fortunately, you do not need to build the manifest file and all the constituent parts in a raw text editor for an app for Office as you did in the previous Try It Out, but you instead have the power of Visual Studio to make this job much less tedious. With the Apps for Office tools installed in Visual Studio, the File ⇒ New Project process is a guided experience that automatically generates an appropriate manifest file for a TaskPaneApp, ContentApp, or MailApp ...