Hello,

I'm writing a small program to synchronize items between an in-house helpdesk system and Outlook's Tasks folder.

At the beginning of the program, I open the Outlook Tasks Folder (programatically) and loop through all the tasks inspecting those that have a user defined property that indicates that the task is a Help Desk item. I create a record in a temp cursor that includes the HelpDesk item's id as well as the tasks entryid property from Outlook.

* Build Cursor Of HelpDesk Tasks Existing In Outlook
CREATE CURSOR oltasks (ticketid C(6), entryid M)
FOR x = 1 TO oFolder.Items.Count
oTask = oFolder.Items.Item(x)
oParm = oTask.UserProperties.Find("TicketID")
IF !ISNULL(oParm)
* insert record into table
INSERT INTO oltasks VALUES (oParm.Value, oTask.EntryId)
ENDIF
ENDFOR

As I syncronize, I didn't want to have to loop through all the open tasks in the Outlook Task Folder when only a few of them apply to the help desk. Using the process above gave me a cursor of just the tasks I'm interested in and something that I can index.

However, I wanted to be able to quickly find these tasks in Outlook later. I was planning on using the Find method of the Folder's Items object. However, the Find method apparently won't work with the EntryID property. (Why? I have no idea.)

* This is what I tried
SCAN
oTask = oFolder.Items.Find("[EntryID]='"+TRIM(temp.entryid)+"'")
IF !ISNULL(oTask) AND !ISNULL(oTask.UserProperties.Find("TicketID"))
oTask.Delete
ENDIF
ENDSCAN

Is there any other way of uniquely referencing a specific Task Item without having to loop through them all? Is there a way of doing a find based on a user defined property ... I couldn't see a way based on the object model. In other words, some way that I could find a Task item based on the Help Desk's ID for that task rather than Outlook's Id?

Thanks so much for your help.

Rodd