Same versions of Office.js hosted on 'beta' and '/1/'?

Question

The production hosted office.js api library at "https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com/lib/1/hosted/office.js " shows /* Office JavaScript API library / / Version: 16.0.7625.1000 */

and

The beta hosted office.js api library at "https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com/lib/beta/hosted/office.js" also shows the same /* Office JavaScript API library / / Version: 16.0.7625.1000 */

Is there something missing on the preview channel updates?

This has also happened earlier.

You can view the comment by "Miro J" at the bottom of this page. Change value of a table in content control

It appears the Office API team put an older version on their CDN as pre-release. Now, things are back to 16.0.7424.1000. I wonder if someone knows a place where I can see what and when changes - the smaller commits? – Miro J. Oct 21 at 14:29

Answer 1

The beta and prod might well have the same baseline Office build number, which is separate from what APIs they support.

Office.js is just a very simple lightweight loader. It ultimately turns around and loads a file such as https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com/lib/beta/hosted/Excel-win32-16.01.js (depending on platform and version). So that's the file whose versions you care about.

For Excel and I think Word (and if not yet, certainly coming soon), you'll see two versions reported:

/* Excel Desktop-specific API library */
/* Version: 16.0.7625.3000 */

/* Office.js Version: 16.0.7621.1000 */

The first number here is the one that is the indicator of what APIs are supported. Its format might change in the upcoming future, but in either case you'll see that the Beta one is always same as or greater than the Release one (and they should both be growing, over time, except in the rare case of a regression, in which case we might temporarily fall back to an older version). The baseline number of the Office.js version is somewhat less relevant, but it too will generally be same or higher on Beta than on Release.

If both beta and release show the same versions, this simply means that there isn't anything we're ready to have folks beta-test yet, over and above what Release already has public. But generally, it means that a new Beta version will soon be on its way.

Answer 2

To expand on what Michael said, for Word, you can check the version on this file, which gets loaded from office.js:

https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com/lib/beta/hosted/Word-win32-16.01.js

This JS does have support for Tables, Lists, and other 1.3 APIs. However, over the past couple months, there have been some significant changes to the beta APIs, particularly with how you access the members of a collection, which may require changes to your code. For example, where you used to use objectCollection.first, you now need to call objectCollection.getFirst(). If you have code that isn't working, feel free to post a snippet.