Scritpts not running in Outlook 2003

[Joe]

I am running Outlook 2003 SP1 and have designed a custom Contact form.
It uses several of the default fields (Address, Company, etc) and about
20 custom fields. There are also some unbound controls (check boxes) and
some VBscript code to process things.

The form has been published to my Personal Forms library, as well as a
subfolder of my Contacts folder.

The problem is that the scripts do not run. They don't work with new
contacts, previously saved contacts or even when in form design mode
(i.e. when you go to Form...Run This Form).

It used to work and I transferred it to the exchange server for testing.
Then I had to change some things and that is where it all went wrong. I
have transferred it back to my personal forms libary, tried flushing the
forms cache, etc. Nothing!

I am totally out of ideas and VERY frustrated!! Any ideas?

Cheers, Joe

 

[Joe]

I am running Outlook 2003 SP1 and have designed a custom Contact form.
It uses several of the default fields (Address, Company, etc) and about
20 custom fields. There are also some unbound controls (check boxes) and
some VBscript code to process things.

The form has been published to my Personal Forms library, as well as a
subfolder of my Contacts folder.

The problem is that the scripts do not run. They don't work with new
contacts, previously saved contacts or even when in form design mode
(i.e. when you go to Form...Run This Form).

It used to work and I transferred it to the exchange server for testing.
Then I had to change some things and that is where it all went wrong. I
have transferred it back to my personal forms libary, tried flushing the
forms cache, etc. Nothing!

I am totally out of ideas and VERY frustrated!! Any ideas?

Cheers, Joe

OK, I seem to have got it working in a rather convoluted way. It's
wasted the best part of a day though, so I would still like an
explanation if possible...

I recreated the form from scratch and the vbscript was working fine in
design mode. I then saved the form to a .oft file as a "backup".

As expected, when I published the form to my Personal Forms folder the
script stopped working. If I tried going to design mode on this form,
the script wouldn't work.

So I opened the saved .oft file, and again, the scripts didn't work.
HOWEVER, with the .oft open, I chose "Design This Form". When I then
clicked "Run this form" from here, it worked again. So I used that form
and published it in a Contacts folder (not Personal forms) and it seems
to work.

I hope that is clear (!).

So basically, it seems when I save my forms to my Personal forms folder,
the scripts are permanently/irrepairably disabled. I don't get this at
all - surely my personal forms library is just as "secure" as a Contacts
folder, so why should scripts be disabled?

<rant>
Does anyone else find there are *loads* of annoyances when working with
forms? For example, multiline text boxes only resize horizontally with
the form. Some of the original boxes can't be made taller (i.e. the
Contacts field on a Contact form). And you can't get the original
boxes/fields back if you remove them because MS doesn't let you get at
them anywhere. There is also a bug with using the LayoutFlags property
that makes your form go one-off. I also came across a bug where if the
form became resized so that a text box overlapped the edge of the form,
it would crash outlook when you tried to open the form in design mode to
fix it. And now all this script business!! Grr!
</rant>

Joe.