Redemption Possibilities

[John Riddle]

After struggling with a couple issues in my Outlook solution for a while and writing clumsy work-rounds, I finally broke down and downloaded Dmitry Streblechenko's Redemption (http://www.dimastr.com/redemption). I thought there would be a huge learning curve, but was amazed at how easy it was to use for a novice VB guy like me! I solved two of my issues almost immediately. (Very efficiently populating a combobox with more than 15,000 contact names from a Public Folder, retrieving more than 32K of data from a single Exchange custom field and populating an Outlook form field with the data).

In playing around with it, I found out that some values were returned in binary form which needed to be converted to string format to be used by Outlook. Redemption has a wonderful method for doing this, HrArrayToString() (although, this particular method is almost completely undocumented and it took me a while to figure out that it existed or how to use it).

Finally, here's my question:

Since I now have access to binary data in Exchange and Outlook Contact Items can only have ONE RTF field supposedly due to the fact that Exchange only supports one binary field per item, can I now with Redemption, add an additional Rich Text control to a contact item, bind it to a custom binary field and then re-populate the control with this data in the Item_Open event? Can anyone provide some help on how to do such a thing?

Thanks Dmitry for such a great tool!

John

 

[Dmitry Streblechenko \(MVP\)]

No, you can store as many binary or string properties as you want. The
problem is that you can have only PR_RTF_COMPRESSED, PR_BODY or PR_HTML
property (they are all related). You can bind a plain text multiline edit
control to a custom property, but you can have only one Message control,
which is capable of displaying plain text/RTF/HTML, but you cannot customize
how it is bound to the best of my knowledge.

Dmitry Streblechenko (MVP)
http://www.dimastr.com/
OutlookSpy - Outlook, CDO
and MAPI Developer Tool

After struggling with a couple issues in my Outlook solution for a while

and writing clumsy work-rounds, I finally broke down and downloaded Dmitry
Streblechenko's Redemption (http://www.dimastr.com/redemption). I thought
there would be a huge learning curve, but was amazed at how easy it was to
use for a novice VB guy like me! I solved two of my issues almost
immediately. (Very efficiently populating a combobox with more than 15,000
contact names from a Public Folder, retrieving more than 32K of data from a
single Exchange custom field and populating an Outlook form field with the
data).

In playing around with it, I found out that some values were returned in

binary form which needed to be converted to string format to be used by
Outlook. Redemption has a wonderful method for doing this, HrArrayToString()
(although, this particular method is almost completely undocumented and it
took me a while to figure out that it existed or how to use it).

Finally, here's my question:

Since I now have access to binary data in Exchange and Outlook Contact

Items can only have ONE RTF field supposedly due to the fact that Exchange
only supports one binary field per item, can I now with Redemption, add an
additional Rich Text control to a contact item, bind it to a custom binary
field and then re-populate the control with this data in the Item_Open
event? Can anyone provide some help on how to do such a thing?

 

[Dmitry Streblechenko \(MVP\)]

You will probably need to use one of the third-party controls. Embedding a
browser (IE) should also work.
I don't work with forms that much, so I am far from being an expert in this
area.

Dmitry Streblechenko (MVP)
http://www.dimastr.com/
OutlookSpy - Outlook, CDO
and MAPI Developer Tool

Thanks Dmitry,

And thanks too, for developing Redemption. I currently have a plain text

multi-line edit control (regular multi-line textbox right?). I've seen over
the months on some of the posts that Outlook doesn't support more than one
RTF field and that a 3rd party control would be required. Well, I've looked
and never been able to find such a control. I thought that if I could find
one that saves as binary, and created a custom binary field in the folder
that I could bind that control to the field and I could solve my problem.

The problem is that we use the Notes field to (of coarse) store notes in.

We must use the Notes field for this purpose because we need these notes
available in the preview pane so that we don't have to open each contact to
quickly see the history of phone calls, meetings, etc.

However, we also have a "Resume" field that stores the job candidate's

resume. This can be quite lengthy and most often very difficult to read when
pasted into a plain text field. These resumes almost always come into in the
form of MS Word documents, so keeping them in that format makes them MUCH
easier to read.

So, I've got Notes that need to be in the Notes field to view in the

preview pane and resumes that really, really SHOULD be in RTF format for
viewing. What am I to do? Any solutions anyone?