Capturing Outlook Infomation

[AlanArons]

There have been many excellent threads about automating Outlook. As I understand these, they all assume that we are using a Visual Foxpro program as the email client.

Has anyone developed a way to use the Outlook Client to enter the Subject, Body, Attachements, etc, and then capture that information when the "Send" button is pressed. Once captured, they would then be saved to a dbf file.

Thanks for your input.

Alan Arons

 

[JRB-Bldr]

Lets explain what is happening when we "automate" Outlook from a VFP application...

Outlook is still the Email Client.

It is only that instead of using direct user input, our application is coming in through the "backdoor" and "driving" Outlook programatically rather than manually. The application tells Outlook what to use for the To:, From:, Subject:, Body", etc. fields. And then tells Outlook to Send the email. I also have a client that is using this same method to send FAX's through Outlook as well.

In that way, the VFP application always has the Outlook data so that, if desired, it can be stored in a DBF file, etc.

If you are wanting to do your automation within Outlook so that it can interact with other "outside" applications, then I would suggest that you post your question in one of the Office forums.

http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=68

http://www.outlookcode.com/

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/forum-276.php

Let us know if you still have questions.

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[Dan Freeman]

The other way to approach this might be a COM addin for Outlook written in VFP. It would "listen" for Outlook events (such as Send) and populate a VFP dbf as needed. (Of course the challenge is to only get those messages that interest you.)

 

[Mike Lewis]

Alan,

I agree with both Dan and JRB. Basically, you need to write code within Outlook to handle this. That code can, of course, call a VFP COM component if you are more comfortable working with VFP.

There's also another approach: You can write a class in VFP containing methods that get called when specified events in Outlook are fired. To do so, you need to add an IMPLEMENTS clause to your class definition.

If you don't know how to do this, see the Help topic: DEFINE CLASS Command - IMPLEMENTS Clause

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My sites:
Visual FoxPro (www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk)
Crystal Reports (www.ml-crystal.com)

 

[AlanArons]

Thanks all. I am going to attempt to place the call from Outlook to a VFox routine. I will let you know.

Alan Arons