Box Annotations allow developers to provide collaboration capabilities right from within the embedded Box preview in their application. Box Annotations fit a wide range of use cases and can be used to draw the previewer's attention and/or provide feedback on specific parts of a document or images. To learn more about Box Content Preview and for further documentation on how to use it, please go to our page on Box Content Preview.
Box Content Preview currently supports four annotation types - highlight comment, highlight only, draw, and point annotation. Box Annotations are today supported on documents and image previews only. You can find the full list of supported file types for Box Content Preview at https://community.box.com/t5/Managing-Your-Content/What-file-types-and-fonts-are-supported-by-Box-s-Content-Preview/ta-p/327#FileTypesSupported.
- Desktop Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer 11
- Mobile support available for iOS Safari, Android Chrome
If you are using Internet Explorer 11, which doesn't natively support promises, include a polyfill.io script (see sample code below) or a Promise library like Bluebird.
en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, en-US, bn-IN, da-DK, de-DE, es-419, es-ES, fi-FI, fr-CA, fr-FR, hi-IN,it-IT, ja-JP, ko-KR, nb-NO, nl-NL, pl-PL, pt-BR, ru-RU, sv-SE, tr-TR, zh-CN, zh-TW
Box Annotations can be used by pulling from our NPM package.
var preview = new Box.Preview();
preview.show('FILE_ID', 'ACCESS_TOKEN', {
container: '.preview-container',
showAnnotations: true,
});Where the default enabled types are point, highlight, and highlight-comment for the Document Annotator and point for the Image Annotator.
import BoxAnnotations from 'box-annotations';
/* global BoxAnnotations */
const boxAnnotations = new BoxAnnotations(viewerOptions);
var preview = new Box.Preview();
preview.show(FILE_ID, ACCESS_TOKEN, {
container: '.preview-container',
boxAnnotations,
});Where viewerOptions is an optional object of viewer-specific annotator options and disabledAnnotationTypes is an optional string array of valid annotation types to disable. See Enabling/Disabling Annotations and Annotation Types below for more details on viewer-specific annotation configurations.
Box Annotations needs an access token to make Box API calls. You can either get an access token from the token endpoint (https://developer.box.com/reference#token) or generate a developer token on your application management page (https://blog.box.com/blog/introducing-developer-tokens/).
If your application requires the end user to only be able to access a subset of the Annotations functionality, you can use Token Exchange to appropriately downscope your App/Managed or Service Account token to a resulting token that has the desired set of permissions, and can thus, be securely passed to the end user client initializing Annotations.
See the following documentation for more details on Annotation-specific scopes to go alongside Token Exchange. These allow developers to enable/disable functionality on Box Annotations by configuring the appropriate scopes on the downscoped token. To learn more, see Special Scopes for Box UI Elements.
Point annotations are supported on both document and image formats. Highlight comment, highlight only, and draw annotations are only supported on document formats.
Supported document file extensions: pdf, doc, docx, ppt, pptx, xls, xlsm, xlsx
Supported image file extensions: ai, bmp, dcm, eps, gif, png, ps, psd, svs, tga, tif, tiff
If you have any questions, please search our issues list to see if they have been previously answered. Report new issues here.
For general Box Platform, API, Elements, and Annotations questions, please visit our developer forum or contact us via one of our available support channels.
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Licensed under the Box Software License Agreement v.20170516. You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
https://developer.box.com/docs/box-sdk-license
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.