On Feb 22, 3:05*pm, "Karl Timmermans" wrote:
"May its an issue with the 3rd party program."
My I offer a suggestion that will probably save you a great deal
of unnecessary aggravation and time....
Given that you are using a custom form, focus ONLY on
the fields you explicitly see in Outlook (those fields
and any UDF's displayed by any ContactGenie program
should be identical). Ignore everything else unless additional
user-defined fields were added to an individual contact
after a custom form was assigned to it. In this case, the custom
form will be "one-offed" but that still should never result in
any "deleted" field from appearing.
IF the program you are using is explicitly iterating through the
contact item's UserProerties collection from start to finish
(i.e. starting at entry #1 for the total number of entries in the
collection) - there is absolutely no question that extraneous info
may be found and if each and every entry is not checked to
ensure that it is valid - you will get the results you are seeing -
deleted fields will be included - there are no ifs, ands or buts
about it. Outlook is not especially meticulous as to what the
UserProperty collection contains but it knows what is relevant
for its purposes. That was a lesson learned the hard way a long
time ago with the release of the first ContactGenie program
back in 2001.
Without knowing the background, sounds nothing more than
what you are seeing is the field add/delete activity that took place
when the custom form was designed (deleting a field from a
custom form does not delete it from the raw UserProperties
collection which I'm guessing is what is going on and not at all
something that you should be remotely concerned about).
Karl
--
__________________________________________________ __________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - QuickPort/DataPort/Exporter/Toolkit/Duplicate Contact Mgr
"Contact import/export/data management tools for Outlook '2000/2010"http://www.contactgenie.com
"SRM" wrote in message
...
On Feb 22, 11:34 am, "Karl Timmermans" wrote:
#1 - If you are using a custom form - user-defined fields should
ONLY be added/deleted within the custom form. You should
NEVER add any additional fields to a contact item assigned
to a custom form since you will only one-off the form. As for
copying contacts that use a custom form - make sure that the
custom form is available (i.e. by either publishing it to the target
folder or to the Personal Forms Lib but strongly advise against
the same form published to both the Pers Lib and a folder -
recipe for problems)
#2 - Custom forms do not have "orphan fields" - the UDF list is
assigned at the "custom form level" and every contact item
assigned a given custom form has the same UDF fields (unless you
have manually added other UDF's (see point #1) . As the two
articles regarding User-Defined fields point out - UDF's
for Folder/Items are different animals then those assigned within
a custom form
#3 - Custom fields in a custom form would be available to be
added to any view - not sure about anything added to the folder
or item outside of the custom form (see item#1). That said,
UDF's added manually to a contact item outside of the
custom form is not a scenario handled by CG Toolkit by design.
If you have 15000 contacts assigned to a custom form and
these contacts additionally have UDF fields that have been
manually added - that by definition means that each and every
one of the manually added UDF's has had a value added to it
a standard UDF does not get added to a specific contact item
unless and until a value is entered into the field. So the question
in this is - how exactly are you determining that the contacts
assigned to a custom form have extra fields - via Outlook or the
3rd party export program you are using?
#4 - Any of the ContactGenie products with export functionality
only include user-defined fields defined at the Folder level
(for items assigned to IPM.Contact) - all item level UDF's are
ignored for the reason(s) mentioned in the original answer. Items
assigned to a custom form only use the UDFs assigned to the
form regardless of what may actually be contained in the a
contact item's UserProperty collection. None of the CG products
directly reference any item via the Outlook object model (OOM)
anymore but instead use Redemption (http://www.dimastr.com)
which avoids a lot of potential problems (not sure about O'2007
and beyond but dealing with the UserProperty collection directly
via OOM opened up a wide variety of potential problems -
not the cleanest collection of fields in the world). Only reason for
mentioning this is that if your 3rd party export program (please
don't reference it by name in this thread - don't know what it is
and don't want to know) is still reporting UDF's outside of those
contained in the custom form, it is going through the contact item's
userproperty collection directly which will include anything and
everything that was ever added to it, something which should be
of no concern if you are using a custom form.
#5 - "Deleted field" not appearing in the CG Toolkit export
field list. Don't understand the comment - why would you want
a deleted field to appear?
Off the cuff, if you want to clean up what sounds like a mess - you
may want to try the following (backing up your PST file before
proceeding!!!!!!)
a) Re-publish your custom form under a new name
b) assign all your contacts to this new form name - that should result
in your contacts only having the UDF's assigned to the custom form
and everything returns to normal. the only custom fields you
should see at this point are those solely assigned within the custom
form. (Am assuming this to be correct but not 100% sure since
haven't tested what happens when #1) UDF's have been manually
added to an item assigned to a custom form and then
#2) changing the assigned custom form)
Karl
--
__________________________________________________ __________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - QuickPort/DataPort/Exporter/Toolkit/Duplicate Contact Mgr
"Contact import/export/data management tools for Outlook
'2000/2010"http://www.contactgenie.com
"SRM" wrote in message
....
On Feb 20, 5:43 pm, "Karl Timmermans" wrote:
First a couple of articles that you may find of interest
#1 - User-defined fields - (in folder) versus (in
item)http://www.contactgenie.com/blog/?p=99
#2 - User-Defined (Custom) fields in Custom
Formshttp://www.contactgenie.com/blog/?p=102
To specifically answer your 2 questions:
#1 - Unless you have specifically deleted a user-defined field
for a given item - it has not been deleted for that item
(hence, whatever export program you're using is picking
up the data at the item level versus the folder level)
Exporting every field at the item level may be a nice
concept but the drawback to that is that "technically"
every contact can have a different set of fields - i.e.
in your case, 15,000 contacts can each have a different
UDF resulting in 15,000 different UDF fields for the
folder. Try and put all your contacts in one file and you
have nothing short of a "mess". The chances of every
contact having a different UDF is highly unlikely but
rest assured that we've seen some "highly creative"
environments when it comes to Outlook data which is
also the basis for another article:
"Yes you can..but should you?"
http://www.contactgenie.com/blog/?p=54
#2 - There is no place in Outlook that lists "orphan" user-defined
fields - you may find ContactGenie Toolkit of interest
which has a function that addresses that particular issue
http://www.contactgenie.com/toolkit_4_outlook.htm
Karl
--
__________________________________________________ __________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - QuickPort/DataPort/Exporter/Toolkit/Duplicate Contact
Mgr
"Contact import/export/data management tools for Outlook
'2000/2010"http://www.contactgenie.com
"SRM" wrote in message
....
I'm using O2003. I have used many user defined fields that I have
deleted and no longer want to use. I have deleted them from my form,
views, and contacts. In fact, I think none of my contacts have user
defined fields in the folder level anymore, only in the item level.
Hence - my first question.
Should I create the same fields at the folder level that are saved in
the item level for my contacts folder? I will be creating other
contact folders.
I am using a third party program to export the custom fields I am
using. However, the program keeps finding all the user defined fields
I have deleted. I'm guessing the fields are still listed somewhere. I
have created new forms, applied new forms, cleared the cache, but
cannot get rid of the user defined deleted fields.
Second question - Is there a place these deleted fields are listed in
Outlook that I can get rid of them? I don't know if there are some of
these old deleted fields at the item level as I have over 15,000
contacts. I don't know if there is a way to find user defined fields
at the item level.
The reason for this is I need to export select custom fields. When
there are dozens of extra fields listed but not used, its a laundry
list of fields I need to pick from. I was just hoping there was a
location I can clean up the
...
read more ยป
Karl:
Thank you for all your help. I will go the route of leaving it as is
and ignore the other (deleted) data. I would of liked to clean it up,
but it seems that is not possible and not really required. I'll learn
from your hard learned lesson.
I did notice one thing about the folder level fields. Not sure if
related to my mess or not, but when I merge from outlook, I need the
folder level fields to complete a merge with Word. I always start my
merges with Outlook. I didn't know if that was unique to my situation
or if you had it documented that I did not find in your articles.
Thanks again for all your help.
Shawn