Drag & Drop From Notes

We are currently investigating drag and drop functionality between Notes (6.5.x) and a VB.net application. Our client wishes to drag a Notes document onto the VB application and use data contained in the document within the VB app. The client has previously had this functionality with MS Outlook and now would like to implement the same functionality using Notes.

Our goal is to obtain enough information about the source (Notes Document) to access it from the VB app either through COM or directly through the C API.

The only useful implementation of a drag and drop operation we have found (using Notes as the source) has been between Notes and the Windows (2000/XP) desktop, where Windows creates a document link file. MS Word also handles the operation but only to create a metafile image.

We have attempted to enumerate and interrogate the available clipboard formats associated with the Notes data. To this point we have been able to identify 5 structures used in the drag/drop operation, these are:

Notes Private Data

Notes Private Link

Link Source Descriptor

Link Source

CF_METAFILEPICT

Of the above structures we have ruled out CF_METAFILEPICT and have been able to extract meaningful data from Link Source Descriptor (with the assistance of a Hex editor), the other 3 structures remain a mystery. The Notes C API documentation does not appear to contain references to any of these structures, nor has searching the web returned anything useful.

Any help you may be able to provide in either detailing the structures useful to us or other methods for implementing drag and drop operations using Notes as the source would be most appreciated.

Subject: Drag & Drop From Notes

there have been some discussions about this before, but without real results.

Link Source Descriptor & Link Source seem to documented in some win32 header files (to some extend), but i think they can include private data that is later passed to the application that created it (e.g. when opening such a link in explorer). but i’m not shure about this.

Notes Private Data & Notes Private Link have not been documented, but maybe don’t contain what you’re looking for. you can’t expect to get data like items along with a drag & drop operation.

but parsing Link Source should give you a link that contains server/database-name, view/doc-id and other things. what i’ve heard you’re able within VB to get this data as stream, so that would be same as you’re working with a file.

links created from notes on desktop/explorer view in editor definitly contain a struct similar to CDRESOURCE (see capi). you should be able to create at least a ndl link in VB.

Markus Seitz

markus.seitz@icodex.com