Calling web services from Outlook form

  • Thread starter Thread starter nitro
  • Start date Start date
N

nitro

I don't know if this is the appropriate forum so I'm placing this post on
both the VSTO forum and the Outlook Form forum. If there's yet another forum
that would befit this discussion then please do redirect me appropriately.

Problem Description:
So I have a (.oft) form that I've created in Outlook 2003 which is
essentially an additional tab in the default Meeting Request form. This form
contains some extra fields that the user can modify and I want to call a web
service with this extra information as soon as the user hits send on the
form.

To add to the complications, the web service I'm trying to call are Axis web
services written in Java. At first, I'd thought I'd use the Soap Type Library
3.0 from within the form to make the web service call but it seems as though
the classes generated by pointing to this Java created WSDL don't respond
very well when I actually try to call the Web Service method and I always end
up getting Nothing as a response. I'm pretty positive I can't even
communicate with the web service at all. As a result of a failed attempt here
I tried the Visual Studio and VSTO approach explained below.

I heard about the supposed proficiency of Visual Studio 2008 to interact
with any kind of web service available. Therefore I figured I would code the
web services part of the application in Visual Studio 2008. The only problem
now is that I don't know how to execute this Visual Studio code with the form
I've created in Outlook so that I can make a web service call with the extra
information contained within the new form.

Any help on this matter would be appreciated. I'm new to all of these
technologies and I've been stuck on this issue for much longer than I
expected.

Thanks in advance.
 
It's a lot easier to work with things like Web services using managed code
and not using VBScript code, which is all you can use in a custom form.

Why not just handle either the Application.ItemSend event or the Send event
for your open item? You can do that in your addin code and use the usual
managed code methods of working with a Web service. Just check in the event
if the item has your custom MessageClass to identify it.
 
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