Dropping a Notes item onto a VB6 or VB.NET control

I would like to drag and drop a Lotus Notes item (Domino) onto a VB6 or VB.NET control. The control must read the list of attachments associated with the mail message. I then need to copy the attachments to a specific folder. I would also like to save the message body and other info to a file in the directory. In other words, extract and copy out the attachments and create an RTF with the body, Mail to etc. data in the file in the specified directory. Could you please help me?
I'm not really up on VB drag-and-drop operations, but I do know that what you get when you drop a Notes document is link information to the document. Your control would have to interpret that information, which includes server name, database replica ID, view UNID and document UNID, and use one of the Notes programming APIs -- OLE would be my choice since you know the Notes client is already running. Java/CORBA is another choice. You'd have to write code to locate the document and read information from it. It's a fair bit of code that I don't have time to write for you right now. Search around -- maybe someone's already done it and you can swipe it. Never write what you can steal, is my philosophy.

This was first published in October 2003

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