If you’re using Exchange, you probably know that every time you rebuild the database or reset the Exchange cache with Entourage 2004, the categories are lost for all your Exchange contacts.
\nA workaround for this problem would be to save the name of the categories to one of the unused custom fields of the contacts (that get synched to Exchange). When you need to rebuild the database, you lose all the categories, but you can find them in the custom field and re-apply them.
\nI thought about writing a script to do just that for a long time, but beside the time that I had very little time to devote to the project, I just plain suck with AppleScript in general and with the commands in Entourage in particular. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve already played around with other languages, but I’m not familiar enough with AppleScript so everything takes me forever. I end up looking up everything in the few books I have on the topic and when I can’t find an easy solution, I workaround the problem piping the script to shell commands :-><\/p>\n
Hopefully, a little while ago I posted what I had in hand to save the categories to custom fields to the Entourage newsgroup and Paul Berkowitz was kind enough to reply, tell me where I was wrong, correct the scripts and post a working script back.
\nWhen I started thinking about the second script allowing me to restore the categories, I found another roadblock. Of course Paul had – again – the perfect solution. He even had additional options for non-preexisting categories and assigning them random colors. I couldn’t be thankful enough\u2026<\/p>\n
Posting code on newsgroup is not really convenient, so I decided to post them here. They seem to work for me. I hope they’ll work for other people too. If they don’t, let me know (you can leave a comment here).
\nYou can easily edit the scripts.<\/p>\n