Drag/Drop/Parse vCard into Fields

[pmears]

I am creating a CRM/Project Management database in Access 2003. On my
Contacts form, I would like to incorporate a feature that would allow a
user to drag a vCard or contact from Outlook onto a form. VBA Code
would then open and parse the vCard into the Name, Phone(s), email, etc
fields.

Has anyone done this or anything similar?

There are two parts to tackle, I guess:
1) Drag and Drop an object onto a form, saving it as an object in the
DB (not as a hyperlink).
2) Parsing the vCard (VCF) file structure into fields.

Help on either one would be appreciated.

 

[John Nurick]

I don't think it's going to be very easy. With luck someone will prove
me wrong!

When I drag an Outlook contact onto a textbox on an Access form, the
result is plain text containing some of the contact fields, in a form
that doesn't look very difficult to parse.

But it may be possible to do something fancier. This
http://www.mvps.org/access/api/api0032.htm may conceivably help.
Probably you'd have the drop launch Access VBA code that automates
Outlook and retrieves the needed fields from the contact object.

That may be the simplest way to handle VCards, too, using Outlook's
ability to create a contact from a VCard.

Otherwise, if a ready-made VB/VBA class or module exists for handling
VCards I've never come across it. But there is an open source C libary
called Libvc, which claims to parse a .vcf file into a data structure.
It should be possible to compile this into a Windows DLL (though again
if someone's done it my web search hasn't found it).