Best method for saving a list of contacts?

[Guest]

Greetings,

We have an interface to allow the user to create a list of contacts (in the
back ground it is a dataset), via filtering, etc. The next step is to allow
them to save these lists somehow. The question is, what is the best means of
saving the list?

One idea is to create a simple dataset, with the EntryID, and StoreID (and
possibly other information if it is usefull to us) of all the contacts in the
list the user created. Then save this dataset into a file, and attach it to
an item that the user could name to look it up later. Then to retrieve the
list of actual contact objects, we would loop through the records in the
dataset, and get the contacts using the Entry/Store ID's.

I'm sure someone has had to do something similar, and I'm just curious if
this is a good way of going about it, or if there are some better methods out
there.

We thought about using distribution lists, but they seem rather limited and
not really suited to our needs. Looked at using links, but that required the
linked items to be writable for the user (which was not an option). Also, we
want these available offline, so a central database wasn't really suited
either.


Any advice would ofcourse be apreciated

Platform: VSTO 2005 SE + Outlook 2003

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

DL's are not very robust. I'd use EntryID and StoreID but bear in mind that
depending on the store provider the EntryID may change if an item is moved
or deleted within the same store. If it's moved to a different store the
EntryID and StoreID will always change.