Using CDO in the CML/LitCrit Application

Microsoft Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) is a technology for building messaging or collaboration applications. CDO is used in various ways in the CML/LitCrit application, including to read from the LitCrit public folder in the Microsoft® Exchange Server information store. For an illustration and brief description of this data flow, see Data Flow Between Internet Explorer and Exchange Server.

About the CDO Libraries

The CML/LitCrit application uses elements from the following two CDO libraries:

• The Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) Library lets you quickly and easily add to your Visual Basic® application the ability to send and receive mail messages and to interact with folders and address books. You can create programmable messaging objects, then use their properties and methods to meet the needs of your application.
• The CDO Rendering Library is associated with the CDO Library, and the two are interdependent. CDO Rendering entails displaying CDO objects and collections over the World Wide Web. See Using CDO Rendering.

The CML/LitCrit application does not use the Collaboration Data Objects for Windows NT® Server (CDONTS) library. CDO is a more appropriate choice for the LitCrit application because the focus of CDONTS is Web messaging — using the SMTP server component of Internet Information Server — and not the message- and field-manipulation tasks performed for LitCrit by CDO.

CDO Usage in CML/LitCrit

The following parts of the combined CML/LitCrit application use CDO:

• The script of the Outlook® EnhancedLitCrit form. See Using CDO in the Outlook Form.
• The Event Service agent that monitors the LitCrit public folder. See Using CDO in the LitCrit Public Folder Agent.
• The ASP pages that support critique functionality within the CML/LitCrit Web application. See Using CDO in ASP Pages and CDO in the CML Application Settings Page.

As you can see from the preceding list, it is the scripting elements of CML/LitCrit, not the compiled CML/LitCrit COM components, that use CDO.