#1 - If you are using a custom form - user-defined fields should
<ONLY> be added/deleted within the custom form. You should
<NEVER> add any additional fields to a contact item assigned
to a custom form since you will only one-off the form. As for
copying contacts that use a custom form - make sure that the
custom form is available (i.e. by either publishing it to the target
folder or to the Personal Forms Lib but strongly advise against
the same form published to both the Pers Lib and a folder -
recipe for problems)
#2 - Custom forms do not have "orphan fields" - the UDF list is
assigned at the "custom form level" and every contact item
assigned a given custom form has the same UDF fields (unless you
have manually added other UDF's (see point #1) . As the two
articles regarding User-Defined fields point out - UDF's
for Folder/Items are different animals then those assigned within
a custom form
#3 - Custom fields in a custom form would be available to be
added to any view - not sure about anything added to the folder
or item outside of the custom form (see item#1). That said,
UDF's added manually to a contact item outside of the
custom form is not a scenario handled by CG Toolkit by design.
<If> you have 15000 contacts assigned to a custom form and
these contacts additionally have UDF fields that have been
manually added - that by definition means that each and every
one of the manually added UDF's has had a value added to it
a standard UDF does not get added to a specific contact item
unless and until a value is entered into the field. So the question
in this is - how exactly are you determining that the contacts
assigned to a custom form have extra fields - via Outlook or the
3rd party export program you are using?
#4 - Any of the ContactGenie products with export functionality
<only> include user-defined fields defined at the <Folder> level
(for items assigned to IPM.Contact) - all <item> level UDF's are
ignored for the reason(s) mentioned in the original answer. Items
assigned to a custom form only use the UDFs assigned to the
form regardless of what may actually be contained in the a
contact item's UserProperty collection. None of the CG products
directly reference any item via the Outlook object model (OOM)
anymore but instead use Redemption (
http://www.dimastr.com)
which avoids a lot of potential problems (not sure about O'2007
and beyond but dealing with the UserProperty collection directly
via OOM opened up a wide variety of potential problems -
not the cleanest collection of fields in the world). Only reason for
mentioning this is that if your 3rd party export program (please
don't reference it by name in this thread - don't know what it is
and don't want to know) is still reporting UDF's outside of those
contained in the custom form, it is going through the contact item's
userproperty collection directly which will include anything and
everything that was ever added to it, something which should be
of no concern if you are using a custom form.
#5 - Re: "Deleted field" not appearing in the CG Toolkit export
field list. Don't understand the comment - why would you want
a deleted field to appear?
Off the cuff, if you want to clean up what sounds like a mess - you
may want to try the following (backing up your PST file before
proceeding!!!!!!)
a) Re-publish your custom form under a new name
b) assign all your contacts to this new form name - that should result
in your contacts only having the UDF's assigned to the custom form
and everything returns to normal. the only custom fields you
should see at this point are those solely assigned within the custom
form. (Am assuming this to be correct but not 100% sure since
haven't tested what happens when #1) UDF's have been manually
added to an item assigned to a custom form and then
#2) changing the assigned custom form)
Karl
--
____________________________________________________________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - QuickPort/DataPort/Exporter/Toolkit/Duplicate Contact Mgr
"Contact import/export/data management tools for Outlook '2000/2010"
http://www.contactgenie.com
Karl:
Thank you very much. I read through your articles (very useful) and
had a few more questions if you don't mind. I greatly appreciate the
articles and your time.
1. If I want a field in a view, I must add it at the folder level.
Since I have no fields left at the folder level, I see that I cannot
add any of my custom fields (currently custom fields only used in my
custom form) to my custom view. Also, I'm assuming its probably best
to create the fields required at the folder level and then copy the
folder. That way I don't have to recreate the fields again at the
folder level for the new folder. Correct on these two items?
2. I have a custom form and have many custom fields created at both
the View level and the Form level. I am not using the IPM.Contact
form. Ignoring first how to clean up the old fields, if I understand
correctly it seems I should only create fields at the View level. I
should not create fields using the form designer. Is that correct?
So I create new fields at view level and then use them in the form
designer. Correct?
3. I tried your Contact Genie Toolkit on a subset contact folder as a
test. I selected the test folder, my custom form, select "Add/Remove
Orphan UDFs", and got a message beginning with FTK031 that it only
works on the IPM.Contact form. Can I use this tool on my custom form
to remove orphaned fields?
I don't know if this part of the discussion should be under your
website.
4. When I tested your export utility, none of the deleted fields
(e.g., Test 1, Test 2) appeared in your export list.
One thing to note is when I created a brand new contact and tried the
export, none of the old deleted fields (e.g., Test 1, Test 2) appear
in the list. It seems new contacts are OK, however, I have about
15,000 that probably still have old data that I want to clean up.
Thanks
Shawn
