Working with Conversations
Working with Conversations
Two Message object properties let you show relationships among messages by defining them as part of a conversation. A conversation is a series of messages, consisting of an initial message and all messages sent in reply to the initial message. When the initial message or a reply elicits additional messages, the resulting messages are called a conversation thread. A thread represents a subset of messages in the conversation.
The Message object properties ConversationIndex and ConversationTopic give you an easy way to organize and display messages. Rather than simply grouping messages by subject, time received, or sender, you can show conversational relationships among messages. The ConversationTopic property is a string that describes the overall subject of the conversation. All messages within the same conversation use the same value for the ConversationTopic property. The ConversationIndex property is a hexadecimal string that you can use to represent the relationships between the messages in the thread. Each message in the conversation should have a different ConversationIndex property.
When you start an initial message, set the ConversationTopic property to a value appropriate to all messages within the conversation, not only to the first message. For many applications, the message’s Subject property is appropriate.
You can use your own convention to decide how to use the ConversationIndex property. However, it is recommended that you adopt the same convention used by the Microsoft® Exchange Client message viewer, so that you can use that viewer’s user interface to show the relationships between messages in a conversation. This convention uses concatenated time stamp values. The first time stamp in the ConversationIndex string represents the original message. Whenever a message replies to a conversation message, it appends a time stamp value to the end of the string. The new string value is used as the ConversationIndex value of the new message. Using this convention, you can easily see relationships among messages when you sort the messages by ConversationIndex values.
The following code fragment provides a utility function, Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp, which can be used to build Microsoft Exchange Server compatible ConversationIndex values. The utility function calls the OLE function CoCreateGuid to obtain the time stamp value from a GUID data structure. The GUID value is composed of a time stamp and a machine identifier; the utility function saves the part that contains the time stamp.
' declarations for the Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp function
Type GUID
Guid1 As Long
Guid2 As Long
Guid3 As Long
Guid4 As Long
End Type
Declare Function CoCreateGuid Lib "COMPOBJ.DLL" (pGuid As GUID) As Long
' Note: Use "OLE32.DLL" for Windows NT, Win95 platforms
Global Const S_OK = 0
' end declarations section
' Function: Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp
' Purpose: Generate a time stamp for use in conversations
' See documentation topic: Working With Conversations
Function Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp() As String
Dim lResult As Long
Dim lGuid As GUID
' Exchange conversation is a unique 8-byte value
' Exchange client viewer sorts by concatenated properties
On Error GoTo error_olemsg
lResult = CoCreateGuid(lGuid)
If lResult = S_OK Then
Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp = Hex$(lGuid.Guid1) & Hex$(lGuid.Guid2)
Else
Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp = "00000000" ' zeroes
End If
Exit Function
error_olemsg:
MsgBox "Error " & Str(Err) & ": " & Error$(Err)
Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp = "00000000"
Exit Function
End Function
When you start a new conversation, set the ConversationIndex property to the value returned by this function, as follows:
' new conversation
objMessage.ConversationIndex = Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp()
When you are replying to a message in an existing conversation, append the time stamp value to that message’s ConversationIndex value, as follows:
' reply within an existing conversation
Dim objOriginalMsg As Message ' assume valid
Dim objNewMessage As Message ' new message in conversation
Dim strNewIndex As String
' ...
' copy the original topic and append
' the current time stamp to the original time stamp
objNewMessage.ConversationTopic = objOriginalMsg.ConversationTopic
strNewIndex = objOriginalMsg.ConversationIndex _
& Util_GetEightByteTimeStamp()
objNewMessage.ConversationIndex = strNewIndex
For additional sample code dealing with conversations, see Posting Messages to a Public Folder.