From: gregarican <greg.kujawa@...>
Date: 2005-09-27T03:26:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Outlook calendar

If you are interested I can e-mail you some .rb files I have that
push/pull data from Outlook/Exchange sources. One word of warning.
You'll have to come up with some mechanisms for trying to pull null
data.

For example if I was to pull contact data for an existing contact and I
wanted their birthday, if the birthday field hasn't been populated in
Outlook/Exchange then the MAPI call returns an error code that has to
be dealt with. It doesn't return nil/null. It errors out. I had to
write a bunch of begin-rescue-end routines into my Ruby files in order
to account for this. Microsoft justifies this behavior by stating they
were looking to streamline their database storage by not storing
anything for nil/null values. It's more like the database columns
aren't even defined at all in these cases!

In any event, if you are interested I can either post some sample code
here or e-mail you the files. Probably better the doing the latter
since they might be kind of long ...