editing DocumentItem properties

[Andreas]

Hi, maybe i am a bit off the track here, but hopefully someone can point me
in the right direction.
I created a DocumentItem object by dropping a file into an outlook folder.
Now I want to edit properties like "subject" or "Author" of the DocumentItem
(not the file itself!).
But those fields are locked for editing. I tried setting the fields by code,
which works fine. I can't imagine this is the only way of doing it, since it
would mean i have to create my own encapsulation as a pane with all the
fields and then call code to update them. Isn't there an easier way to make
those fields editable?

thank you for taking the time to read and think about this!

Andreas

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

If you turn on in-cell editing for the view, you can edit the Subject (which also can be changed with VBA code). The other properties you're interested in are promoted to the Outlook view from the corresponding fields in the document itself and thus are read-only in the view. Think about it: If you change the Author for the view but not for the document itself, isn't that misrepresenting the content of the document?

 

[Andreas]

Hi Sue,

thanks for the answer. I would agree with you, but in my tests, the Author
property is not even filled - I dropped a pdf file into the folder, I can
change the subject (though the property for this is called "task subject"),
but all the document metadata like Author and keywords remain empty.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

I suspect that Outlook handles metadata only for Office document types. And as you've found, it takes code to set metadata.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54

 

[Andreas]

After digging around a bit more I found that you can only set the Subject
field for the wrapping object, you can't set any of the properties for the
actual document object. Well, maybe with redemption I could do some more, but
it's not worth the effort.
And another thing is, yes, Outlook stores the document metadata, but only
for office files (not pdf or other files, which is quite annoying )

Thanks for the help Sue!