I'd like to create a program which format signature in Outlook 2007.
The user will only have to lauch Outlook. It will search informations about the user, then will create automatically the signature.
The user wouldn't have to open any menu, the program will do it for him.
I'd like to know what language will be easy to use to create this kind of program ?
Thank you
I'd say you shouldn't be simulating clicks, instead you should just generate an automated signature file which the user could then load.
Edit:
The file formats for windows signatures are.txt, .htm and .rtf. All of these are very well documented formats and should be easy to generate. They should be saved in c:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures. Outlook saves each signature in all three formats, presumably for portability to other apps and individual email settings (for instance if the user uses HTML or not).
Related
I am looking for a programmatic way to export all chat messages (textual and image contents) of each Microsoft Teams channel to a word or pdf document (any output medium that supports text and messages). I need to be able to do this without needing to seek permissions from the corporate global admin for specific roles. I have studied different methods already like the Graph API (azure app registration) , ediscovery, and extracting this information from a hidden outlook folder. The common theme in these methods is that we will need to seek permissions from the IT admin for a specific need in the export strategy.
So far, I have tried using the web app version of Microsoft Teams and using web scraping methods, I have been able to cycle through messages in each channel and export them into a word document. I was wondering if there was a more elegant, better method with lesser likelihood of being error-prone.
Looking for some suggestions.
Here's a nominal solution. It admittedly is not great/complete. But it does work to some degree.
You inspired me to clean up my attempt and publish it:
https://github.com/poleguy/selenium_teams
Tested on ubuntu 20.04 only.
Clone the repo.
Run the ./setup_python to get a conda environment.
Edit the script to specify your url/login.
Run python ./selenium_teams.py
Log in manually in the browser that pops up.
Go to the chat you want to slurp. Click in the "Type a new message" section.
Press enter to let python continue.
This will start to save all the messages to a text file.
Once you have the text file convert it to pdf or word.
(Incomplete: can't do images, runs very slowly, may run out of memory.... very little testing.)
When a user copies text to the clipboard, is it possible in Windows to programmatically identify the source file (and/or URL) and text position?
I have looked at a bunch of clipboard management applications (Ditto, clipboardFusion, ArsClip, and ClipDiary) and none appears to record the source of a clip.
It is my belief that this functionality in not possible, but I would like another opinion or two before I abandon my attempts.
I currently think the only way to achieve the desired behavior is to create an add-on / extension for every application that will be copied from. The extension would override the applications normal copy to clipboard behavior with a new format that adds the additional information. The key applications for me would be adobe acrobat (or another pdf reader) and a browser.
Windows does not require any source information to be given when setting clipboard data. Additionally, the only information needed to enable calling that function is a window handle. As such, the best windows could give you in a general case is the window handle that set the clipboard data via GetClipboardOwner.
Some applications set some of the formats on the clipboard to the source location of other data on the clipboard, but again in a general sense, there need not even be any source data; an application can just place random arbitrary data on the clipboard.
For your specific use case, you may be able to write a grease-monkey script to add your meta-data, and as firefox/chrome can display PDFs you might even be able to use the same script for PDFs.
I'm using Outlook 2007. I have no experience with Windows programming or VBA, as all of my background is on Unix systems. I am attempting to have Outlook save each incoming emails as text file, and then a run a python script which will parse this text file.
I found this question which seems to provide some VBA code to accomplish the first task, but I'm not sure how to utilize it. I open the Visual Basic Editor, but have no idea how to proceed from there. I tried saving the text as a module, but when I attempt add "run a script" in an Outlook rule, no scripts are available. What am I doing wrong?
EDIT: Clarification.
I'm assuming you're familiar with coding at some level, even if not on Windows. You may want to do some general background reading on Outlook VBA; some resources on this would be a Microsoft article, this article from OutlookCode, and so on - there's a ton of resources out there with walkthroughs and examples.
Addressing your specific question: take a look at this Microsoft KB article, which describes how to trigger a script from a rule.
The key to getting started once you've gotten your VBA editor open is to double-click a module on the left, for example ThisOutlookSession (under 'Microsoft Outlook Objects').
That should give you an editor you can paste code into. Bear in mind that (per the above MS page) your procedure must accept a MailItem object, which will be the item that the rule has in hand, so the linked example you gave would have the first couple of lines changed from:
Sub SaveEmail()
Dim msg As Outlook.MailItem
' assume an email is selected
Set msg = ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)
' save as text
[...]
...to:
Sub SaveEmail(msg As Outlook.MailItem)
' save as text
[...]
Essentially you're being handed a MailItem rather than having to create it and connect it to the selected item in Outlook.
To achieve the second task of 'running a script' on the file, I'm assuming that you want your VBA to make changes to the file after it's been saved? This is pretty straightforward in VBA, and you'll find lots of examples for it. One pretty simple outline is in this answer.
Edit based on comments: to launch an external tool, you can use either the Shell command if you don't need to wait for it to complete, or you can use one of the many Shell-and-wait implementations floating around, for example this popular one. Or, you can use the WScript approach in this answer.
Note that you'll need to ensure Outlook is set to allow macros to run, and you will probably want to sign your code.
I want to write a custom save as dialog that is hooked into the File -> "Save As" of most Windows program. This custom dialog will allow the user to enter their username, password, destination folder and uploads the file to the web server via a POST. If the user clicks cancel, it will call the original file dialog.
I've been reading up about Windows API hooking and this is vaguely how I think I would approach this:
Intercept "Save As"
Display my custom dialog, return some temporary path on the drive
Let the program write file to the temporary path, assume it calls WINAPI CreateFile(...) for now
Read the temporary file and upload to web server
Clean up temporary file
But I still can't get my head around the steps required to pull this off. Assuming I can intercept the "Save As" and CreateFile function, how do I detect the CreateFile was called from a "Save As" and not just any random file creation? I can think of a hack where I keep track of the time difference of when the File dialog got open and CreateFile got called.
My alternative solution is to use the existing file dialog and create a special folder on the disk, that is constantly monitored. When a file gets written there it will call an external program that uploads the file. I haven't looked into how to do this yet. I suspect this is easier.
UPDATE
As a first baby step, I wrote a .NET task tray application that allows the user to enter their login details and a folder to monitor. Whenever a file gets dropped in there there it will upload to the web server. So far it seems to work. Now I just need to figure out how to add a nice shortcut to the left pane of the file dialog. Once that's done I think I got a solution I'm happy with.
There is no need to hook or patch anything. Create a shell namespace extension that supports IStorage::CreateStream and implements it by returning a stream that POSTs its data to the Web server. The user can then choose to save the file to your namespace extension in order to upload the file.
Hooking the standard save dialog requires you to inject a DLL into every running process and have it replace the import stub of the the Win32 API GetSaveFileName() function in the process's PE header (something anti-virus and anti-malware apps are not likely to be happy about).
Then there is the new-style save dialog that was introduced in Vista using the new IFileSaveDialog COM interface instead of GetSaveFileName(). For that, you would have to uninstall and replace Microsoft's default FileDialog COM object with a custom implementation.
That does not count custom-made save dialogs, which you are not likely to hook.
If, by some miracle, you can hook the dialog and have it return a custom path of your own creation, you don't need to hook CreateFile() itself, Just monitor the folder that you create for your purposes. Place it where it is unlikely that any other app (or user) besides you will write files to. You can create a custom subfolder in the user's or system'ss AppData folder for that purpose. You can use SHGetSpecialFolderPath() and/or SHGetKnownFolderPath() to find those folders.
The tricky part will be detecting when the file is finished being written to and has been closed. You will have to monitor the folder for changes, such as with ReadDirectoryChangesW() or SHChangeNotifyRegister(), and periodically open new/modified files for exclusive access. If a file is still open by someone else, you won't be able to open it yourself. But once you do open it, you can do whatever you want with it.
I am looking at using AquaticPrime for my key generator for a Cocoa shareware app. For those of you who don't know about it, you can check it out here: http://aquaticmac.com/. However, I am running into a problem when I attempt to implement it. I don't want my users to have to copy and paste a whole dictionary into my app (or select it from a file browser), I just want them to have some code like: 1111-1111-1111-1111-1111 that will unlock the app for them. Is there some way to do this in AquaticPrime? But assuming that it can't, is there some other framework that does do this or would I just have to hard code it?
The reason it uses license files is to make it cryptographically hard to make up licenses—you can't just write a keygen like you can with license numbers.
You can make this easy by making a custom file type for license files in your application's Info.plist. (This must be app-specific. When you begin your second product, you'll need to make a new type.) This type will have a custom, app-specific filename extension with it.
Then, when the user double-clicks on the license file (possibly in Mail), the OS will open it with your app. You'll handle this, probably in your app delegate, by feeding the license file to AquaticPrime to validate.
This way, the user does not even have to summon a dialog box, copy the license number, and paste it. All they have to do is double-click on the license file.
Thus, the license file makes it easier to register your application, not harder.
If you have a trial version of your application that is unlocked then you can do the following.
1) Create a custom url scheme.
Follow the instructions on this posting but instead of http and https make your application respond to something like activate-com-mycompany-myproduct.
Once the user has run your application once any link in a browser like activate-com-mycompany-myproduct://somedata will automatically open your application.
2) Provide a product activation link in your final buy page of your web store and your email receipt. To make it simple for the user and not for you, append a unique id to the URL. Map the ID in a database, generate a license plist on the fly and push it to the user seamlessly.
In case someone else stumbles on this question: you might also want to take a look at CocoaFob. The keys it generates are rather long, but closer to the format you were after and still easy enough to cut and paste.