Is there a way to trigger an action without a button click - outlook

Question

I'm about to develop an add-in that will automatically pull some data from emails and modify some fields in our database. However this extraction could be a bit error prone so we wanted a layer of human verification when it occurred.
We do this in gmail already, when the user open an email and we find something we want to extract we display a confirmation pop-up, and this feature is very well received by our clients.
I am planning on using the dialogbox but it seems to trigger this the action to display the box needs to be attached to a ui element for the user to click.
Is there any way to tigger an action pragmatically, without a users click?

Answer 1

Take a look at the pinnable task pane available for Outlook add-ins, see Implement a pinnable task pane in Outlook for more information. There you can implement the ItemChanged event handler. The event handler should accept a single parameter, which is an object literal. The type property of this object will be set to Office.EventType.ItemChanged. When the event is called, the Office.context.mailbox.item object is already updated to reflect the currently selected item.
Office.initialize = function (reason) {
$(document).ready(function () {
// Set up ItemChanged event
Office.context.mailbox.addHandlerAsync(Office.EventType.ItemChanged, itemChanged);
UpdateTaskPaneUI(Office.context.mailbox.item);
});
};
// Example implementation
function UpdateTaskPaneUI(item)
{
// Assuming that item is always a read item (instead of a compose item).
if (item != null) console.log(item.subject);
}