Introducing new ways for developers to control and communicate with our office editors

 We're unveiling a brand new set of APIs—including window.postMessage and Named Ranges—to help developers building custom apps to better communicate and exchange contextual commands with our office suite editors. 

Developer controls for Zoho Office Suite

The Zoho Office Integrator program was first introduced to help developers make the best use of our powerful document, spreadsheet, and presentation editors by enabling them to bring those apps to any custom solution they're building.

However, as we started working with more developer partners, one common request we received was to have APIs that made it easier to access and manipulate specific parts of the document content and to exchange content between the editor and the host app on a continuous basis.

We're addressing these requests today in the form of new content manipulation APIs, additional customization controls, and more in Zoho Office Integrator. Take a look!

1. Cross-origin communication between host app and the editor

Zoho Office Integrator now supports window-to-window communication via postMessage APIs—meaning our editors running on zoho.xxcan exchange commands with a host app that runs on another window with a different domain (say zylker.xx) to insert content, create documents, and more.

For example, in a medical record management app, say zylkerhealth.com, hospitals can automatically add Doctors' signatures to patient reports as soon as a Doctor approves a report via the app.

PostMessage APIs in Zoho Office Integrator

Signature of the Doctors stored at zylkerhealth.com (host page) as an image will be transferred over to the sign field in the preset template at writer.zoho.com (separate window/pop-up) synchronously, creating a connected, holistic experience.

API docs of supported editors:

Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show

2. Controllable text ranges in documents

The new NamedRange APIs let you mark sections of a document and run operations to replace text, add additional text within the range, move cursor to a section, or extract text from these sections to display elsewhere in your app—programmatically.

Executing NamedRange APIs in Office Integrator

This opens up a wide range of possibilities for developers to:

Refer to specific parts of a document and list them on your app as notes, without having to actually open the document

Apply common formatting to specific parts of a document with the press of a button

Lock specific parts of a document (like the clauses in a contract) once the user fills them in

locking document sections via lock APIs

API docs of supported editors:

Zoho Writer

3. Configurable wipe options

By default, all document data stored temporarily for real-time collaboration is deleted from our servers every six hours. However, we're introducing new configurations to set custom intervals for data-wiping for your API Key.

API Documentation

That's all for now. If you're interested to learn more about integrating Zoho Office editors into applications you build, head over to Zoho Office Integrator.

Happy building!

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