Loading custom functions on macOS fails consistently every 2nd time

[fzumstein]

Your Environment

• Platform [PC desktop, Mac, iOS, Office on the web]: Mac
• Host [Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.]: Excel
• Office version number: 16.89.1 (24091630)
• Operating System: macOS

Expected behavior

Sideloading the manifest.xml doesn't fail with Error installing functions in the taskbar.

Current behavior

Every 2nd time that I load the manifest.xml via sideloading, it fails with Error installing functions in the taskbar and custom functions return a #NAME? error.

Steps to reproduce

1. Download manifest from https://xlwings-server.onrender.com/manifest and sideload it. You probably get the error.
2. Quit Excel completely and restart
3. sideload the manifest again, you won't get the issue and you can click on "Insert custom functions" in the taskpane and everything will work.
4. Repeat the steps again and you'll see it'll fail every 2nd time.

Useful logs

These are the debug logs. They differ slightly when it works vs when it fails: fails.log works.log

[shanshanzheng-dev]

Hi @fzumstein Thanks for reporting this issue, I'm trying to repro but not. It always load successfully. could you share us the repro video? Thanks

[fzumstein]

Sorry about the delay, I didn't get a notification for whatever reason. You're right, I can't repro the issue anymore with the hosted URL/manifest. However, it still repros on localhost. See video: https://www.loom.com/share/63be407bbdd840cc909ddfc31903dc81?sid=a2b05f6d-53bd-40de-b9c4-618825e276ee

If you want to repro this locally, you can follow the docs here (various options, like docker compose or GH codespaces): https://server.xlwings.org/en/latest/quickstart/ You can use noncommercial as license key.

[fzumstein]

I currently can't repro this anymore locally. I did a few things in the meantime, so possible candidate for fixing this are:

• Deleting the cache with this additional dir, which seems to be missing in the docs ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Office/16.0/Wef/
• Putting a <Version> tag of format x.x.x.x instead of x.x.x into the manifest
• Removed an additional manifest from the sideloading dir, which was setup in a similar way (although it had an own Id and different custom function namespace).

My bet is on the first one.