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OfficeDev / office-js

A repo and NPM package for Office.js, corresponding to a copy of what gets published to the official "evergreen" Office.js CDN, at https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com/lib/1/hosted/office.js.
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Adding 'Clear Web Cache' for Desktop Excel Webview Personality Menu #5154

Open fds-sj opened 21 hours ago

fds-sj commented 21 hours ago

Adding 'Clear Web Cache' for Desktop Excel Webview Personality Menu

Hi team, filing this enhancement request here for greater visibility. This request has already been filed to services-hub with request ID 2412020030007041.

Business Impact

  1. Which of the Microsoft 365 Apps channel is this fix needed in? - Microsoft Excel on Web, Desktop, Mac
  2. How are you using the product in question and what functionality are you attempting to provide to the business? - We developed an Add-in for inserting FactSet Formulas used for getting financial data. These financial data includes both historical and live/streaming.
  3. How is the problem keeping you from performing specific business functions? - When the add-in is not returning the expected values or is returning an error, one of the first things we ask the users to do is to clear the cache and/or delete cookies. This works on most cases but doing this requires navigation for the users which could be cumbersome.
  4. If the problem is not resolved, how will it affect your business? - We are aiming to lighten the support burden. The support load will not decrease as a notable number of users may have to reach out to our Support Team. Having this would be helpful since the client may no longer have to contact our Support Team if troubleshooting steps are available on our User Interface.
  5. How many users are affected by this issue? - Impossible to calculate since this is part of our basic troubleshooting steps, but currently we have ~800 users according to our October data
  6. How frequently are those users affected by this issue? - We have this troubleshooting step done to ~80% of users contacting support.
  7. What is the financial impact of this issue? - Impossible to quantify.
  8. What are the proposed workarounds and why are they not acceptable? - N/A

This is already an existing feature in webview engine used by Mac Excel and we want this as well with Window's Desktop Excel. Please see below images for comparison:

personality-menu-mac personality-menu-windows

RuizhiSunMS commented 18 hours ago

Hi @fds-sj, thx for reaching out here. I try to get your points and would you please correct me if wrong?

  1. after working well for some time, your addin would definitely return error or wrong value due to cache problems.
  2. clearing cache could always resolve the problem but your team is not sure about the exact cause in cache.
  3. clearing cache is a acceptable resolution to you
  4. your request is to let win32 client has the functionality to clear cache. Win32 client is the only target.

And besides, here are some other questions:

  1. would you please share an example excel file and addin (code snippet is also ok)
  2. may we know what does your addin do to cache?
RuizhiSunMS commented 18 hours ago

And as far as I can understand, #5155 and this case are the same?

fds-sj commented 17 hours ago

Hi, this is more of a feature request to make it easier to clear the web cache in the webview engine being used by Excel in Windows. When troubleshooting issues, this is one of the first things we ask our users to do and navigating the developer tools to is not ideal to our end users. This is already an existing tool in the Personality Menu of the webview engine being used in Mac verion of Excel, so we are wondering if this could be added as well to the Window's version.

For the #5115, this is different but also one of the steps we ask our users to do when troubleshooting issues. We also want to make this step easier to navigate for user and also non-affecting of other addins installed. I just filed a separate request for this one since they are technically different.

These two requests were also already filed and acknowledged in the services hub. We've already been told that a design change request is already filed to the product group team and awaiting for confirmation. Just filing here as well for better visibility.

RuizhiSunMS commented 17 hours ago

Thx @fds-sj. I'll reach out to experts of this area. If we got any update, I'll reply here.