Life cycle of Word addin when document is updated by colleague via Sharepoint?

[aorsten]

We have developed an MS Word add-in using office-js. It works really well, and we have deployed it with customers.

However, we are noticing now that when customers collaborate in the same sharepoint/onedrive document, the add-in keeps refreshing/reloading. It appears to occur when changes are synchronized from the colleague's computer. It seems to occur when the colleague makes changes to the document using context.sync() methods. Then the add-in-browser is somehow refreshed, and developer tools are closed.

In practice, our add-in is impossible to use if several people collaborate on the same document.

We cannot find any useful documentation from Microsoft on this topic - namely what the expected behavior from an add-in is, when the document synchronizes due to changes by someone else?

Questions:

• Why does the add-in refresh like that?
• Is that expected behavior?
• Is there any documentation of this lifecycle?