Search IDOL from within Outlook

Phil Cox

The purpose of this article is to show how easy it is to use the https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/idol/IDOL_24_1/Content_24.1_Documentation/Help/Content/Actions/Query/Query.htm Query functionality of IDOL. In this example we integrated the search criteria to be the highlighted text in Outlook.

We start with our VS Project to create our Outlook Add-In

There are many other resources available on how to make an Outlook Add-In.

In order to bring up the menu on highlighted text in Outlook with a right hand mouse button click, the context menu is called

<contextMenu idMso="ContextMenuReadOnlyMailText">

and the selected text is called "ThisAddIn.Application.ActiveExplorer.PreviewPane.WordEditor.Application.Selection.Text"

Once we have the two we can query idol as follows across all databases and by restricting the returned characters to make the return value more predictable. We also added term highlighting as well.

http://idolserver:9100/action=Query&DatabaseMatch=*&MaxPrintChars=250&Highlight=terms&Text=" + SelText ( Our text selection )

When to do a query to IDOL similar to the one above we get a reply similar to the one below and we need to parse out what we want to make our clickable links.

In order to create our clickable links we used our WebView2 Control and add that into a CustomTaskPane Control for Outlook.

Then its a matter of building the html from the XML and viewing in the form.

The results are like the following. Our highlighted term is AGILUM …Rev21 and we can see that IDOL found exactly what we wanted and shows the matched terms highlighted in red.

See the IDOL_Search CustomTaskPane displaying the search results.

Then the image below shows the results from clicking on one of the result links.

I hope you can find new ways to incorporate IDOL into your environment.

Many thanks

Phil ****