Office-js: Add-in Error - This add-in is no longer available

[mattblackdev]

Friends,

I wanted to share my experience with this issue. At Medtronic we are developing a Word add-in and we needed to setup a stage environment. So we have 2 manifests, one for the local webpack dev server and another for the stage server. Soon, we will need a third for prod. FYI, I am on macOS, latest High Sierra v10.13.6 running the company installed O365 and Word shows v16.17.

To create the manifest for stage, I simply copied the dev manifest and modified all the urls to point to the stage server. While side-loading this one a few times and switching between it and the dev mani., at some point Word would not load the add-in via office-toolbox, nor show it in the list of developer add-ins. It sadly displayed, "Add-in Error - This add-in is no longer available. If this add-in's manifest was removed, please restore it to its previous location and try again"

It did this for both the stage and dev manifest. The only thing I could do was upload the stage mani. to Word Online. I tried tweaking little things like the , , etc. to no avail. However, I created a new "yo office" generated add-in and it side-loaded just fine. Then, I sought to destroy every bit of Office related cache-looking files and folders on my system. No luck. As a last resort, I decided to reinstall Office. Still no luck! I followed a guide to completely remove office from disk, hoping to inadvertently trash some obscure remnants of my corrupted developer side-loaded add-in, and reinstalled Office three more times, finally remembering to restart my machine before and after the last attempt...

No luck.

But alas, duty calls. I remembered my previously successful test of the newly generated add-in project and its glorious "Your sample add-in loaded succesfully." popup.

I copied the new project’s manifest into our project and it mysteriously side-loaded our project just fine. Then I started swapping lines of the new mani. with our mani, except for the resids, the little xml attribute that maps strings to usages 20 lines above. I left them as “Contoso.blah.blah” instead of “Medtronic.blah.blah”. Side-loaded fine.

Then I changed them all to “Medtronic.blah.blah” and it failed! Someone shoot me! At this point the manifest was back to its original state. So I changed them all to “MDT.blah.blah” and it worked again!

So, I thought, is the whole manifest getting hashed, cached and keyed by hash signature? But if that were the case, changing any character in the manifest should change the hash signature, which did not have an effect. The only thing that worked was changing these oh so vital resids.

I dug deeper still, trying to find maybe one of the resids to blame. After much trial and error, I am 51% certain the Url resources’ resids are to blame. Changing their resids seem to have an effect, but not their values, while changing other resources’ resids don’t, nor any of their actual values, as far as I can tell, and that’s as far as I want to dig on this.

Still doesn’t explain why completely uninstalling and reinstalling the entire Office suite did not matter… Lord have mercy. Bless you Microsoft.

[JuaneloJuanelo]

@mattblackdev quick question: did you changed also the IDs of the manifests? or just the URLS? please try that and let me know how it goes. thanks!

[RXminuS]

Wow, thanks for writing such detailed history. having the same issue and gone through same steps. But this might at least provide a short term fix!

[RXminuS]

Ok, I think my issue must be unrelated (although the same error messages) because a copmletely fresh yo office manifest file doesn't sideload either

[jamesdlow]

Did anyone ever find a way around this? I'm having the same issue in Excel.

[wh1t3cAt1k]

I just faced a similar issue after I had been side-loading locally for a while and then installed a store version as soon as it got approved.

Upon calling an add-in's custom function in Excel for Mac, I get a second taskpane tab saying "this add-in is no longer available".

Clearing Mac office caches as indicated in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/testing/debug-office-add-ins-on-ipad-and-mac does not help: it still tries to load custom functions, apparently, from nowhere as opposed to the add-in I just installed from the store.

[abimaelmartell]

Any fix on this? I'm having this same issue