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Teams Messaging Extensions Action

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Messaging Extensions are a special kind of Microsoft Teams application that is support by the Bot Framework v4.

There are two basic types of Messaging Extension in Teams: Search-based and Action-based. This sample illustrates how to build an Action-based Messaging Extension.

Included Features

  • Bots
  • Message Extensions
  • Action Commands

Interaction with Messaging Extension

msgext-action

Try it yourself - experience the App in your Microsoft Teams client

Please find below demo manifest which is deployed on Microsoft Azure and you can try it yourself by uploading the app package (.zip file link below) to your teams and/or as a personal app. (Sideloading must be enabled for your tenant, see steps here).

Teams Messaging Extensions Action: Manifest

Prerequisites

  • Microsoft Teams is installed and you have an account
  • .NET SDK version 6.0
  • dev tunnel or ngrok latest version or equivalent tunnelling solution

Run the app (Using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio)

The simplest way to run this sample in Teams is to use Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio.

  1. Install Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.10 Preview 4 or higher Visual Studio
  2. Install Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Teams Toolkit extension
  3. In the debug dropdown menu of Visual Studio, select Dev Tunnels > Create A Tunnel (set authentication type to Public) or select an existing public dev tunnel.
  4. In the debug dropdown menu of Visual Studio, select default startup project > Microsoft Teams (browser)
  5. In Visual Studio, right-click your TeamsApp project and Select Teams Toolkit > Prepare Teams App Dependencies
  6. Using the extension, sign in with your Microsoft 365 account where you have permissions to upload custom apps.
  7. Select Debug > Start Debugging or F5 to run the menu in Visual Studio.
  8. In the browser that launches, select the Add button to install the app to Teams.

If you do not have permission to upload custom apps (sideloading), Teams Toolkit will recommend creating and using a Microsoft 365 Developer Program account - a free program to get your own dev environment sandbox that includes Teams.

Setup

Note these instructions are for running the sample on your local machine, the tunnelling solution is required because the Teams service needs to call into the bot.

  1. Run ngrok - point to port 3978

    ngrok http 3978 --host-header="localhost:3978"

    Alternatively, you can also use the dev tunnels. Please follow Create and host a dev tunnel and host the tunnel with anonymous user access command as shown below:

    devtunnel host -p 3978 --allow-anonymous

  2. Setup for Bot

    In Azure portal, create a Azure Bot resource.

    • For bot handle, make up a name.
    • Select "Use existing app registration" (Create the app registration in Microsoft Entra ID beforehand.)
    • If you don't have an Azure account create an Azure free account here

    In the new Azure Bot resource in the Portal,

    • Ensure that you've enabled the Teams Channel
    • In Settings/Configuration/Messaging endpoint, enter the current https URL you were given by running the tunnelling application. Append with the path /api/messages

  3. Clone the repository

    git clone https://github.com/OfficeDev/Microsoft-Teams-Samples.git

  4. If you are using Visual Studio

    • Launch Visual Studio
    • File -> Open -> Project/Solution
    • Navigate to samples/msgext-action/csharp folder
    • Select TeamsMessagingExtensionsAction.csproj or TeamsMessagingExtensionsAction.slnfile

  5. Update the appsettings.json configuration for the bot to use the MicrosoftAppId, MicrosoftAppPassword, MicrosoftAppTenantId generated in Step 1 (App Registration creation). (Note the App Password is referred to as the "client secret" in the azure portal and you can always create a new client secret anytime.)

    • Set "MicrosoftAppType" in the appsettings.json. (Allowed values are: MultiTenant(default), SingleTenant, UserAssignedMSI)

    • Set "BaseUrl" in the appsettings.json as per your application like the ngrok forwarding url (ie https://xxxx.ngrok-free.app) after starting ngrok and if you are using dev tunnels, your URL will be like: https://12345.devtunnels.ms.

  6. Run your bot, either from Visual Studio with F5 or using dotnet run in the appropriate folder.

  7. This step is specific to Teams.

    • Edit the manifest.json contained in the appPackage folder to replace your Microsoft App Id (that was created when you registered your bot earlier) everywhere you see the place holder string <<YOUR-MICROSOFT-APP-ID>> (depending on the scenario the Microsoft App Id may occur multiple times in the manifest.json)
    • Edit the manifest.json for validDomains with base Url domain. E.g. if you are using ngrok it would be https://1234.ngrok-free.app then your domain-name will be 1234.ngrok-free.app and if you are using dev tunnels then your domain will be like: 12345.devtunnels.ms.
    • Zip up the contents of the appPackage folder to create a manifest.zip (Make sure that zip file does not contains any subfolder otherwise you will get error while uploading your .zip package)
    • Upload the manifest.zip to Teams (In Teams Apps/Manage your apps click "Upload an app". Browse to and Open the .zip file. At the next dialog, click the Add button.)
    • Add the bot to personal/team/groupChat scope (Supported scopes)

Note: If you are facing any issue in your app, please uncomment this line and put your debugger for local debug.

Running the sample

Note this manifest.json specified that the bot will be called from both the compose and message areas of Teams. Please refer to Teams documentation for more details.

  1. Selecting the Create Card command from the Compose Box command list. The parameters dialog will be displayed and can be submitted to initiate the card creation within the Messaging Extension code.

4-ME-Card

5-ME-Card-data

6-ME-Card-Preview

7-ME-Posted-Card

  1. Selecting the Fetch Roster command from the Compose Box command list. You will presented with prompt for Just In Time installation if app is not already added to current team/chat.

8-Roster-Fetch

9-Roster-Fetched

  1. You can try with other supported commands as well like: Adaptive Card, Web View, HTML, Razor View

Deploy the bot to Azure

To learn more about deploying a bot to Azure, see Deploy your bot to Azure for a complete list of deployment instructions.

Further reading