fdo#51004: some progress and 10 years old bug pending

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 10:26:29PM +0200, David Ostrovsky wrote:
> Am 17.10.2012 13:24, schrieb Lionel Elie Mamane:
>> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 08:07:53AM +0200, David Ostrovsky wrote:

>>>> But take into considreation that on windows old mozab driver
>>>> still used.

>> Sorry, I didn't follow this story closely. Why?

> Because on windows moz driver is also in charge for accessing O and
> OE address book.

That's maybe a reason for keeping mozab around (for O(E) AB support),
but that shouldn't keep us from implementing Mozilla Address Book
support through mork on Windows, too :)

As to accessing Outlook address book, we can access it over ADO (like
we do for Microsoft Access files). It needs Jet 4.0, but it is bundled
with Microsoft Windows since Me/2000. I see several references to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnsmart00/html/sa00h12.asp but
it gives me a blank page right now.
Alternative references:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275262
http://www.codeproject.com/Questions/192505/Connection-String-for-Outlook-2010
http://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.asp?ID=3886
http://vbcity.com/forums/t/6878.aspx


Or we could access Outlook directly over COM/...; there are examples
(for VBA) there:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290792
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290658
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/adodotnetdataproviders/thread/812d1fb3-a997-487e-9c4f-75227521d4b8
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vblanguage/thread/1cf06a86-2a28-4359-8046-6c5b5a5fd934


All these solutions would not require a "new" driver, we just generate
the correct ADO connect URL and hand it off to the ADO driver (as we
do for .mdb / .accdb files).


As to accessing Outlook express address book,
http://forums.devx.com/archive/index.php/t-66624.html
says one can do that through the Windows Address Book (WAB) API. It
seems to be deprecated (see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms629361%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
). The replacement is Windows Contacts API
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735779%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
that's a venue to explore, too.


This would require an actual driver, that handles the SQL itself, like
mork for Mozilla.


> I see three options here:
> 1/ extract the parser bits from mozilla driver (reverse engineering) or
> 2/ find an alternative parser solution
> and integrate the picked parser implementation in the new mork driver
> or
> 3/ discontinue O and OE address book support (from LO 4?), and wait
> until windows platform
> get non deprecated O/OE native support and then reenable it again.

Or as above use Microsoft's parser :)

-- 
Lionel