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Address Book Hierachy & Macros
 
I'm new to The Bat!, but so far I'm pretty excited to be using it. It's just what I've been looking for (for the last 15 years :-).

Here's what I want to do:

I want to be able to organize my address books and individual entries in a hierarchy that is independent of the address book groups.

Here's what I mean:

CompanyA (handle = ca)
  Sales (handle = sales)
      John Doe (handle = jd)
      Jane Jones (handle = jj)
CompanyB (handle = cb)
  Sales (handle = sales)
     John Doe Jr. (handle = jd)

In this case handles only need to be unique within the hierarchical level of the address book that they're in.

Then in a macro I want to be able to say something like:

%To = Get Address Book(handle = ca.sales.jj)

Is this possible with The Bat?

Thanks,
Frank.
 
Hmmm. In a word ... no.

Groups are part of the infrastructure of The Bat! and should be considered for implementation strategies, mostly because of their usefulness in filtering.

Yes, there is a %TO='...' macro.
Yes, there are Address book related macros, but they are more suited to getting extra information from the address book record, using one of these parts as the index:

TO use the address entry for the TO addressee of the current message
OFROM use the address entry for the FROM address of the original message
OREPLY use the address entry for the REPLY-TO address of the original message
OTO use the address entry for the TO addressee of the original message
FROM use the address entry for the FROM address of the current message
REPLY use the address entry for the REPLY-TO address of the current message

So - I don't quite see how that would fit in with your intended scheme.

If you were really ambitious, I suppose you could write your own addressing index system using a series of flat files and regex lookups to access the right one then use the %AB macros to index further information from the full address book record.
iviarck
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