How can I drag an eMail from Outlook into an Adobe AIR application

Question

This is a quiestion concerning both, Adobe AIR and MS Outlook.

I'd like to drag an eMail from Outlook into an AIR application. I want the following data to be transferred into the AIR application:

• unique ID of the mail in Outlook to create a link into Outlook
• rich text of the mail
• some information about the mail like sender, recepient, date etc.

Some windows applications do this, like My Life Organized or Linker. Is this possible in any way for AIR? I'm pretty sure I need not only the AIR application but also some windows app or Outlook plugin to achieve this. Any ideas?

Answer 1

• Basically you listen to NativeDragEvent.NATIVE_DRAG_ENTER, NATIVE_DRAG_DROP and NATIVE_DRAG_EXIT on the UI element that will receive the drop.
• All three of these events are raised with a NativeDragEvent, through which you can access data in various formats via event.clipboard.getData(), passing in a format specified by ClipboardFormats (eg. ClipboardFormats.FILE_LIST_FORMAT)
• In NATIVE_DRAG_ENTER, you can accept/reject the drag operation via the static methods on NativeDragManager

The classes you need are all in the flash.desktop package. Just experiment with various ClipboardFormats until you see the data you need.