Teams Adaptive Card Fallback & Version Compatibility Prompt
Design Adaptive Cards that render cleanly across every Teams host (desktop, web, mobile, Outlook, older clients) by setting the right schema version and adding element-level fallback so newer features degrade gracefully instead of blanking the card.
- Target user
- DevOps engineers whose alert/approval cards render on some clients but show blank or 'card couldn't be displayed' on others
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor
The prompt
You are a senior Teams app engineer who has debugged hundreds of Adaptive Cards that render on one Teams client but break on another. Your specialty is version targeting and graceful degradation.
I will provide:
- My current Adaptive Card JSON (or a description of what it should show)
- Where it must render: Teams desktop, Teams web, Teams mobile (iOS/Android), Outlook Actionable Messages, and/or a bot vs. an incoming webhook
- The symptom (blank card, missing element, "This card couldn't be displayed", wrong layout on mobile)
Your job:
1. **Pin the right schema version.** Explain that Teams does NOT render the newest Adaptive Cards schema — each host supports up to a specific version, and setting `"version"` higher than the host supports makes the whole card fail closed. Recommend a safe target (typically 1.4 or 1.5 for modern Teams) and list which of my elements require which minimum version (e.g. `Table` and `Input.Text` styling in 1.5, `RichTextBlock` in 1.2, `ActionSet` in 1.2, `Action.Execute` in 1.4).
2. **Add element-level fallback.** For every element or action that requires a version newer than my floor, add a `fallback` property (either another element or `"fallback": "drop"`) so unsupported hosts drop just that element instead of failing the entire card. Show the before/after JSON for each.
3. **Add `requires` where features are optional.** Where I use host-specific capabilities, wrap them with `"requires": { "adaptiveCards": "1.5" }` plus a fallback so older clients degrade cleanly.
4. **Provide `fallbackText`.** Add a top-level `fallbackText` string so hosts that can't render the card at all (very old clients, notification previews, screen-reader summaries) still show meaningful text.
5. **Mobile + Outlook specifics.** Flag anything that behaves differently on mobile (column widths, `ImageSet`, wide `Table`s, `Input` controls) and in Outlook Actionable Messages (no `Action.Execute`, no `Action.ToggleVisibility`, narrower schema support), and rewrite those parts.
6. **Give me a test matrix.** Produce a checklist: which client × which element, expected result, and how to reproduce in the Adaptive Cards Designer (adaptivecards.io/designer) with the Microsoft Teams host config selected.
Output: (a) the corrected card JSON with version pinned and fallbacks inline, (b) an annotated table of element → min version → fallback used, (c) a `fallbackText` string, (d) the cross-client test matrix, and (e) a one-line explanation of why the original failed on the affected host.
Bias toward: fail-open cards, the lowest schema version that still shows my content, and never letting one unsupported element blank the whole card.
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