Question

I want to get currently selected embedded Attachment object when right-clicking on it in context menu and clicking on custom button.

These are the steps I have done so far:

• Added custom Button for ContextMenuInlinePicture ribbon context menu

  <customUI ...>
      <contextMenus>
      <contextMenu idMso="ContextMenuInlinePicture">
          <button id="SendInlinePictureToHbbButton"
                  label="Send to HBB"
                  onAction="OnSendInlinePictureToHbbButtonClick" />
      </contextMenu>
      </contextMenus>
  </customUI>
  

• By right clicking on it I am calling my function OnSendInlinePictureToHbbButtonClick:

      public void OnSendInlinePictureToHbbButtonClick(IRibbonControl control)
  {
      var msg = "OnSendMailToHbbButtonClick \n\n";
      if (control.Context is Explorer)
      {
          msg = "Context=Explorer \n";
          var explorer = control.Context as Explorer;
          if (explorer.AttachmentSelection.Count >= 1)
          {
              msg += "AttachmentSelection \n";
              msg = explorer.AttachmentSelection
                  .Cast<Attachment>()
                  .Aggregate(msg, (current, attach) => current + attach.DisplayName + "\n");
          }
          else
          {
              var selection = explorer.Selection;
              msg += "MailItemSelection \n";
              if (selection.Count == 1)
              {
                  var olItem = new OutlookItem(selection[1]);
                  msg = msg + olItem.Subject + "\n" + olItem.LastModificationTime;
              }
              else
              {
                  msg = msg + "Multiple Selection Count=" + selection.Count;
              }
          }
      }
      MessageBox.Show(msg);
  }
  

• When running add-in, I can see custom context menu item when right clicking embedded image/attachment.

• After clicking on that button, above method is run, but I cannot get “AttachmentSelection”. Instead I get “MailItemSelection”.

• How I can get Attachment object user is right clicking, so I can work with it?

Answer 1

I have contacted Microsoft via MSDN subscription incident resolution and they told me that this cannot be done.

Attaching MS response:

Hello Martin, I am from the Messaging Developer Support team and
have now taken ownership of this case. I apologise for the delay, but
my team currently has a very high workload and this is affecting our
response times. I’ve had a look at the question as described at
How can my Outlook add-in get the Attachment object the user is right-clicking in my custom menu?
, and the simple answer is that it is not possible to do what you want
to using the Outlook Object Model. Your code is doing what is
expected, as you are querying the Explorer object for its selected
items – and you are having the MailItem returned. This is the
selected item in the Explorer object. There are no events/properties
exposed by the preview pane, so it is not possible to determine which
object is selected there. It would be possible to find all the inline
attachments of the currently selected item if that would be helpful,
but the functionality you are after is not available. Please let me
know if you would like any further information.