Hi folks! We’re Toby Baratta & Elizabeth Dinella, Office Extensibility Interns who worked on the Graph explorer over the summer. Graph explorer is a web application for exploring Microsoft Graph, the unified endpoint for Office 365 and more Microsoft Cloud services. In its previous version, Graph explorer had a limited set of capabilities that didn’t allow developers to fully discover and leverage all that Microsoft Graph has to offer. Today we are happy to announce lots of cool functionality that we enabled during our internship! Now you can:  

Learn about what the Microsoft Graph has to offer with a cool autocomplete feature built in the request builder.  

Before, Graph explorer was clean and simple for easy REST tests. However, you needed to know the structure of queries to be able to use it – this means a lot of time flipping back to the documentation, rather than just exploring! The new Graph explorer has autocomplete, as seen below so as soon as the user starts typing, the explorer presents the options for continued queries.  

Access and use the Graph explorer, regardless of disability. 

Graph explorer is now screen-reader accessible as well as tab-through accessible. We’re working with the Accessibility team to keep the Graph explorer to Microsoft’s standards of accessibility to allow all developers to explore the Graph. 

Use the Graph Explorer even if you do not have an Office 365 account, by accessing sample data. 

You can now use the Graph explorer to access sample data without having to log in with your own account. You can run any kind of GET command that you would if logged in with your personal or work/school account, and get a response back from a demo account in Office 365.  

Use your personal Microsoft Account to log-in to the Graph Explorer; it previously only supported work and school accounts. 

All Microsoft accounts on Office 365 have access – including: live.com, hotmail.com, and outlook.com accounts. We’re saying goodbye to the ‘cannot consent’ errors and saying hello to your own personal data with explicit consent. Rather than being told you cannot consent, you now can access all your personal content on your personal accounts!  

Access the Graph explorer with a work or school account, even if you are not an organizational administrator. 

You can now use Graph explorer to interact with your data even if you are not an administrator. Before you would hit an error message about consent, but now you can access your own information and play.  If you do have an admin account, you can explicitly consent for scopes that require admin consent on behalf of your entire organization. 

Review and return to past queries. 

In addition, we’ve added in a history option, so now one can quickly see what queries were previously executed in the session, as well as what the return values of those queries were. This makes it easy for someone to make small changes and revert back, or to debug different types of queries. 

Customize your request headers to allow in-depth testing.  

Finally, we’ve allowed you to customize any request headers. This works well with the new Excel REST APIs, allowing you to establish a session with a workbook. It also allows you to test with your own authentication token, rather than the one generated through the Graph explorer application.  

We hope you enjoy all the improvements we have added to the Graph explorer, if you have feature requests let us know on User Voice or questions Stack Overflow. This internship was amazing and we are looking forward to seeing increased usage of the Graph explorer as a result of the improvements we added to it!  

Thanks! 

Toby & Elizabeth