This is a problem I've been working on for some time but yet to have a satisfactory solution.

A customer service department uses Outlook for all emails that come through their department. Some of the emails that come in are from customers with boats under warranty, dealers, parts suppliers, or from engineers working to fix problems. Currently the customers read the email and manually look up the data inside various VFP applications if necessary.

My solution is an Outlook plug-in that when clicked launches my VFP application and parses the email to look for serial #'s, common vendor codes, part #'s, etc. and then display the appropriate record. This works well and saves a lot of time. Particuarly once a customer for example, includes their serial # in the email.

I've got this working using ShellExecute to launch my VFP application from the outlook plug-in button and passing the EntryID of the selected email. This works really well in that I don't have to build a ton of email functions and interface in VFP to manage the email and the users get to keep their Outlook settings and all their current workflow in tact, but with more automation.

My issue is one of performance. I basically don't want to launch my application from scratch every single time. Plus, once the application is launched I have to create an Outlook automation object and use the entryID to look up the email I need to parse. So I'm getting sort of a double performance hit.

What I'm hoping for is a way to call my VFP from Outlook to display the appropriate screen without having to relaunch VFP each time. COM doesn't work for me because of the required visual elements. The whole point is to show the correct form.

I've also tried using syntax like:

set lo = CreateObject("visualfoxpro.application")
lo.docmd("do setup.prg")


I have some success with this but Outlook hangs until I quit the object. I'm wanting the form up but Outlook should still be functional. Just like the ShellExecute does. Also "visualfoxpro.application" doesn't work with runtime.

I've tried "visualfoxpro.runtime.7", "visualfoxpro.runtime.8", and many others. But I always get various errors.

It seems like there should be a way to call methods in a running VFP application from an Outlook add-in. I also could see lots of uses for this down the road if I could figure it out.

Anyone have any ideas?

Greg