AutoArchive programmatically

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert Morley
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R

Robert Morley

Hi everyone,

I've actually got two problems, but I've worked around the second, so let me
present the unsolved one first:

First, I'm looking for a way to programmatically run an auto-archive. I've
tried hunting around, and I'm damned if I can find anything. Even if I
triggered the "File", "Archive" menu, that would still pop up a menu, which
sorta defeats the purpose.

Okay, my second problem is that I'm looking for a way to force automatic
processing of receipts. If you leave Outlook open at the Inbox, it'll
eventually get around to processing some receipts, but it never seems to do
a complete job if you have a lot of them, and in any event, you never know
when it'll "get around to it".

What I'm doing currently, which is definitely a kludge, is to open the
Inbox, scan through each message and if it's a receipt, open it and then
close it again right away, which forces Outlook to process the receipt
immediately. With sometimes hundreds of receipts to go through, this can be
a little annoying, since you have to wait, pretty much unable to touch
anything as it opens and closes a window for each and every one of them.
I'm convinced there's got to be a better way, preferably one that doesn't
involve any visuals of any kind...can anybody provide any suggestions?



Thanks,
Rob
 
1) There is no way other than automating the execution of the menu item to
start the AutoArchive process programmatically.

2) Have you tried enabling the "After processsing, move receipts to" setting
under Tracking options? Otherwise, you can create a rule that moves items
using the Report form (choose "using the form name" rule option, and choose
Report form the Application Forms library), which may work better for you.
 
To answer your question, yes, I've got the "After processing" option set to
move them to the Deleted Items folder.

The problem isn't getting the receipts to be moved after being processed,
it's getting Outlook to decide that they need to be processed NOW. It seems
to wait about 10 minutes or so after you've opened Outlook before it starts
a background scan for receipts. Because I'm just opening Outlook briefly to
process receipts for this particular account, the processing is supposed to
be on-demand and I'd like to have it begin it's processing pass immediately,
not "whenever it feels like it". :)

In any event, I'll try your suggestion about adding a rule and see if that
forces it to process them, but I think maybe I tried that a while ago and it
didn't...it's been a while since I played with it, though, so I'll
double-check.



Thanks,
Rob
 
FYI, as expected, using a rule simply moved them to the Deleted Items folder
without processing them properly, regardless of my settings in "Tracking
Options".



Rob
 
Well, at least that tells me what the criteria are for automatic processing.

Somehow it seems a little gauche to programatically open up an e-mail then
tell the user not to touch their computer for several minutes, since you
don't know exactly when it'll start or how long it'll take to be done.

It may be a kludge, but at least opening and closing each message forces it
to happen right away, and you can add a progress bar based on the number of
messages in the folder. (Of course, it's a little hard to see the progress
bar with message windows constantly opening over top of it, but hey, what
can you do?)

Now if there was a way to open a message window hidden, that'd be truly
helpful, since it would make my kludge much less kludgey, but it seems you
can't do that with the Inspector.Activate method in Outlook XP (otherwise I
would've). I can, of course, set the WindowState after activating it, but
since my next statement is Inspector.Close, there's very little point, and
it doesn't get around the fact that it opens visibly anyway.

The article does bring up another possibility, though, which is to delete
the message...I wonder if programmatic deletion of one message at a time
would trigger the logging? Guess I'll have to try it out.



Rob
 
Unfortunately, it would seem that the Item.Delete method doesn't cause the
item to be processed, only deleting it from the main Outlook window. One
wonders if there's some hidden method, or Extended MAPI method that would do
it, but I'm not sure if I want to go to that level.



Rob
 
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