Using VSTO to perform an action via selected e-mail text in Outlook

This should be pretty a pretty common scenario, but I have not found a solution yet.

I would like to highlight some text within the body of an e-mail and then click on something (context menu, toolb开发者_如何学Pythonar button, etc) to perform a URL navigation using the selected text. For example, highlight the Fex Ex tracking number and then navigate to their web site using it as a query parameter (like "ww.fedextracking.com?packageid=12345").

How can you capture the selected text within an e-mail and then perform an action? I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or examples.

Thank you!

For Outlook 2007-2010 (or previous versions using WordMail), you can retrieve a Word object from the Inspector.WordEditor property. Then you can work with Word.Selection to access the selected text.

However, for Plain Text or Rich Text scenarios with Outlook 2000-2003, you have to use the SafeInspector object with Redemption (http://www.dimastr.com/redemption/) to access the selected text. I can't remember, but for HTML format messages with Outlook 2003-2003 you may be able to access the selected text with the IHTMLDocument object retrieved from SafeInspector.

I appreciate it's 588 days since you asked your question Loki70, but if somebody else Googles up this page (like I did, looking for how to create a selected text right-click context menu entry) then this may be an answer for you.

I have been using AutoHotKey, which works not just in Outlook, but everywhere in Windows, and have been writing utilities to Google the selected text, open an SSH session in PuTTY to the selected hostname, and similar.

If you don't mind running an extra application on your PC to capture the hotkey combination that you send, then this would do exactly what you're asking.

Here is my post on the AutoHotKey forum with a link to my code:

http://www.autohotkey.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=86402

It would be trivial to adapt this to do the FedEx query you've mentioned.

I hope this helps.