How to customize the fields of the Reply message of a new message

[Lotte]

Hello,
I have created a new message form and added a couple of user fields that I
want to force users to fill in when sending such a message. The form works
fine and the sender needs to fill in the fields which are displayed to the
recipient below the Subject field in the message header (above the message
contents). Also, when users respond to the new message (form), they can
either keep or change the information in these new user fields, similar to
what is the case with e.g. the Subject field, when pressing Reply. Pressing
Reply rightly brings up the same form. So far so good. My problem lies with
the Reply functionality: when 'including the original message text' I only
get the four fields
From:
Sent:
To:
Subject:
and the contents of the original message included with the reply, and not
the newly added user fields that I would also have wanted in the reply
contents for tracking purposes.
Is there a way to include the values of the user fields in the reply?

 

[Hollis Paul]

and the contents of the original message included with the reply, and not
the newly added user fields that I would also have wanted in the reply
contents for tracking purposes.
Is there a way to include the values of the user fields in the reply?

The "reply" code is what Microsoft provided to handle standard messages in
the limited way that they provided. I view it as private code, and you will
not be able to change it.

To get the functionality that you want, you will have to delete the reply
action that MS puts in every message and create your own "reply" action.
This should use code to explicity copy the old message into a new message,
but using objects you have named, so that, once the new message is created,
you can use those objects to copy in your specific field data.

Take a look at these pages to see how to go about this:

Creating a "New Fax to Contact" Action 5/10/2006
New Fax to Contact sample form for Microsoft Outlook, demonstrating use of a
custom action
http://www.outlookcode.com/d/forms/contfax.htm - 19 KB

Customizing Microsoft Outlook Message Forms 5/10/2006
Quirks, limitations, samples and other resources for designing custom
Message forms for Microsoft Outlook
http://www.outlookcode.com/d/messageform.htm - 23 KB

For background, look at this page:
http://www.slipstick.com/emo/1997/up970804.htm#custom