Understanding Discussions

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The Discussions collection contains all the Discussion objects associated with each level of discussion on a page. In turn, each Discussion object might have a Discussions collection that contains the Discussion objects related to that level of discussion.

A Discussion object represents an entry in a discussion. Each Discussion object has properties and methods you can use to specify the information that appears in the discussion, as well as how and when changes are made to a discussion. Several of these properties map directly to settings you can specify in Discussion fields of the Discussion Options dialog box.

You add a Discussion object to a Discussions collection by using the Discussions collection's Add method. You remove a Discussion object from a Discussions collection by using the Discussion object's Delete method.

The following code illustrates one technique you can use to get some basic information about the number of top-level discussions on a page:

Sub DisplayDiscussionInfo(strURL As String)
   Dim colDiscussions As Discussions
   Dim dscCurrent As Discussion
   Dim strMessage As String
   
   Set colDiscussions = OSE.OpenDiscussions(strURL)
   If colDiscussions.Count = 0 Then
      strMessage = "The page '" & strURL _
         & "' has no discussions."
   Else
      strMessage = "The page '" & strURL _
         & "' has " & colDiscussions.Count _
         & " discussions." & vbCrLf & vbCrLf
      For Each dscCurrent In colDiscussions
         With dscCurrent
            strMessage = strMessage _
               & "The top-level discussion number " _
               & .Index & " " _
               & IIf(.Discussions.Count > 0, "has one or more", _
               "does not have") & " replies." & vbCrLf
         End With
      Next dscCurrent
   End If
   MsgBox strMessage
End Sub

Each Discussion object in the Discussions collection represents a message in a discussion thread. If a page has a single message, the Discussions collection will contain a single Discussion object representing that message. If there are replies to a message, the Discussion object's Discussions property will return the collection of all replies to that message. This pattern is repeated for every Discussion object in a thread that has replies. The following figure illustrates the relationship between a Discussions collection and the Discussion objects it contains:

Relationship between Discussions Collections and Discussion Objects

The Discussions collection for this page contains one Discussion object. That Discussion object's Discussions property would return a Discussions collection containing two Discussion objects, and so on. The following code sample illustrates how you would refer to the message entitled "This is another reply to a reply." In this example, the colDiscussions variable represents the Discussions collection returned by the OpenDiscussions method:

With colDiscussions(1).Discussions(1).Discussions(2)
   MsgBox .Subject & " added to page at: " & .Timestamp
End With

See Also

Using Web Technologies with Office XP | Working with Office Web Discussions Client | The Office Web Discussions Client Object Model | Enabling Discussions | Understanding the Global Object | Understanding Discussion Servers | Understanding Subscriptions