Custom Outlook Form

[Thaddeus]

I am creating a custom outlook contact form and would
like to lookup and display multiple contacts from
existing contact cards. However, when I try to use
the "contact" selection from the "field chooser" I can
only input one contact. I will need to display and
choose about 20 different contacts and I am wondering how
to tell each "contact" selection to be individual.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

The Contacts button/box on the first page of the contact form can hold up to
30 contact links.

 

[Thaddeus]

Can I setup those links to display individually in their
own fields? I am also a little unclear on the contacts
button/box you are referring to. Is this in the standard
contact form, or is it in the field chooser or toolbox?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

I'm referring to the Contacts button/box on the standard contact form and in
the Field Chooser. All linked contacts are stored in the ContactItem.Links
collection, which is what that control exposes. If you want some other
display, you'll have to build that functionality yourself.

 

[Thaddeus Mack]

How would I build that functionality then?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

That really depends on exactly what you want the user to see, how you want
their interaction with the form to take place, and what data you want to
store.

 

[Thaddeus]

If the form display the separate contact name or heading,
that would be sufficient as long as that heading was
linked to the actual contact card. Here is what we are
doing. I work for an architecture firm where we want to
display project information such as contacts specific to
the project. We use the same consultants on various
jobs. These consultants are divided into different
groups, such as engineers, contractors, product reps, and
village contacts. Each of these groups has its own tab.
In each tab, I want to display the selected contact from
our master address book. On some projects, we use more
than one contact in each tab. So I guess the way I would
like them displayed is the way they are done currently in
the contacts button/field where you click on the name and
the contact card is displayed. But under each tab and in
each contact field, the primary, secondary and tertiary
contacts are individual to each field. Is there a way to
pull that off?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

The display that Outlook provides for linked contacts works exactly the way
you see it, no more, no less. You cannot repurpose it to work some other
way. You will need to design your own mechanisms to allow the user to select
contacts, to display the contacts in the contact form, and to open their
related contact records. If the contact names are unique and all in one
folder, then it wouldn't be too hard to display the Outlook address book,
allow the user to select a name, and store that name in a property on your
item; see http://www.outlookcode.com/d/code/selectnames.htm . Note that CDO
or Redemption is required.

You could then add more code behind the form to perform a
MAPIFolder.Items.Find lookup on the target folder to find a contact with a
particular name and then display it.