Implementation

Although the design of the Corporate Media Library/Literary Critique (CML/LitCrit) application was fairly complete as presented in the Design Decisions section, the developers knew more detail would be necessary. For example, the Adding a Critique from the CML topic states that CDO would be used to populate a critique with data and post it to the LitCrit public folder. But it is not stated which elements of CML/LitCrit actually call CDO functions, and why. Details such as these, which clarified gradually during implementation, are presented in this section.

In addition, some changes were made to the stated design of the CML/LitCrit application. These include changes both to the user interface and to the implementation of logic. For example, where a single form of one message class was expected, three versions (three message classes) were found to be needed. Changes such as these are also presented in this section.

Finally, other more general details considered interesting or helpful are given here. But for the most surprising discoveries, see the section entitled Lessons Learned. It is here that you find workarounds to the tough problems encountered during the creation of CML/LitCrit.

Important Development Note  Before you can begin developing an application like CML/LitCrit, you must complete the procedures in the Setting Up Your Development Environment section.

Relation to the CML Application

CML/LitCrit is based on the original CML application, whose implementation is discussed in Scenario 1 of this guide. These are the major topics that describe the implementation of the CML application:

• CML Architecture. This section describes the location of the CML's elements on the three tiers of the application.
• BackOffice Logo Program. This section describes how the features of both the original CML application and the combined CML/LitCrit application comply with the "Designed for Microsoft® BackOffice®" logo program.
• Overview of CML Objects. This section describes the intrinsic objects and custom objects used by the CML application.
• CML Features. This section divides the functionality of the CML application into several sections and describes in detail how they were made to work.

New Tools & Technologies for Scenario 2

In addition to the tools and technologies used to create the original CML application, Scenario 2 uses the following:

• Microsoft Outlook was used to develop forms.
• RDS customization handlers provide a more flexible way to retrieve data.
• Hierarchical recordsets (data shaping) provide a more flexible way to display data.
• The Microsoft® Outlook® HTML Form Converter was used to create the form used to open critiques (for reading and writing) from Web pages in the CML application.