Re: New "IM Address" field

[Paul Berkowitz]

Title: Re: New "IM Address" field

On 6/7/04 1:18 PM, "Dan Frakes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I just discovered the new "IM Address" field in Entourage. It's a welcome
> addition -- I'd been using Custom 6 for IM addresses previously.
>
> However, I've been trying to find a way to show the IM Address field as a
> column in the list of contacts and as a criteria in the Find/Custom View
> dialog. Is there any way to use it in either location?

Nope. Already a "long-standing feature request", at least among beta-testers. They seem to have a habit of introducing new features and not quite integrating them into new features (probably lots of code changes required). It must depend partly on how late in the cycle the new stuff gets added. IM Addresses integrate with MSN Messenger, so I guess they needed MSN Messenger 4.0 to be completed before they could get down to things. The trouble is, sometimes things get forgotten in later versions. For example, the File/Exports/Contacts seems to have been brought over from OE 5 and has never added Categories.
>
>
> On a related note, is there a way -- when using custom views or the Find
> dialog -- to effectively view/find all items that have or don't have a value
> for a particular field? For example, I was trying to create a custom view
> for all my IM contacts. The easiest way to do this should be to view "IM
> Address exists" or "IM Address does not exist." (Forget, for the moment,
> that "IM Address" isn't a criteria in the Find/Custom Views dialog ;-) ) But
> that's not an option. Since not every IM address is a full email address, I
> can't use "IM Address contains @," and the Find/Custom View dialog doesn't
> support regular expressions (so I can't use "*"). I ended up working around
> the limitation by manually finding all contacts with an IM Address,
> assigning them to a new category ("IM"), and then creating a Custom View
> that shows all contacts of the category "IM." Is there an easier approach?

That sounds like a good approach. You could write a short AppleScript that found all the contacts with IM addresses (they _did_ include a new element 'instant message address' in the AppleScript - you're welcome) and assigned them that category if they didn't already have it. You could use the script to update periodically. You'd have to say whether you want "IM" to be the priority category or not. I'll assume not, here: if a contact has another category, the new IM category will tag along as a secondary one, bit will still show up in the custom view you made.



tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
    set IMContacts to every contact where (every instant message address of it) ≠ {}
    set IMCat to category "IM"
    repeat with i from 1 to (count IMContacts)
        set IMContact to item i of my IMContacts
       set theCats to category of IMContact
       if theCats does not contain {IMCat} then
           set end of theCats to IMCat
           set category of IMContact to theCats
       end if
   end repeat
   display dialog "Done!" buttons {"OK"} default button "OK" with icon 1
    -- set displayed feature of main window to custom view "IM Contacts"    
end tell


Uncomment the last line if you want your custom view to open. Use the correct names for the category and the custom view.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

PLEASE always state which version of Entourage you are using - **2004**, X  or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.