Drag And Drop From Outlook

This questions comes from Genero developers who are trying to write an application where an end-user will drag and drop an attachment from an Outlook e-mail into a Genero application.  They find they can’t drag an attachment from an Outlook e-mail direct into the Genero application.  What they can do is drag the attachment from an Outlook e-mail to the Desktop, and then drag the file from the Desktop to their Genero application.  What they want is to do this in one step and not two.

This isn’t a common problem unique to Genero applications.  You can find plenty of stack overflow posts of other developers encountering something similar.  I found this answer to be a good short summary https://stackoverflow.com/a/49679156/2088674 .  Essentially the solution was that you needed to install a plugin into Outlook so that the drag and drop content generated by Outlook pointed at a physical file.

The article mentioned three different tools or plugins.  The Genero developer who discovered this and reported back to me a few years ago reported success using the DDAddin plugin.  There is no reason to doubt that the other solutions mentioned in the stack overflow post don’t work as well either.

What was interesting rereading that Stack Overflow answer was the updated answer that suggests the plugin might be no longer required.  If you are a developer who has previously discovered and has been using the plugin, you might find that a combination of the latest Outlook and latest GDC/Browser might mean the plugin is no longer necessary.  It is something you should make a note to periodically review, rather than perhaps unnecessarily insisting on the plugin being in place forever.

This is also an example that sometimes issues are not unique to Genero.  It can pay to look around and see if other developers, particular Web developers face the same issue.