Using Groovy Scriptom to report on Outlook

As with most work places, I use MS Outlook Calendar at work for meetings, calendars, etc. With Outlook 2007 you have capability to categorize each meeting/time block that you have on your calendar. So you can classify each meeting as either design, architecture, learning, recurring, etc. Using Groovy Scriptom module you can do what you would usually do using VBScript. Scriptom allows you to use ActiveX windows components from Groovy. Needless to say this will only work on windows platform.

I used the scriptom to report on how I am spending my time. (ah.. have to fill those time sheet) Using Swingbuilder and JFreeChart, I threw in this simple script. You will need to setup dependency exactly as described on the help page here.

import org.codehaus.groovy.scriptom.ActiveXObject
import org.jfree.chart.ChartFactory 
import javax.swing.WindowConstants as WC

def outlook = new ActiveXObject("Outlook.Application")
def namespace = outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
def calFolder = namespace.GetDefaultFolder(9)
def myItems = calFolder.Items

def today = new Date()
startWeek = today - 7 
endWeek = today + 7
def categoryMap = [:]

for (i in 1..myItems.Count.value) {
     def currentMeeting = myItems.Item(i)
     if (currentMeeting.Start >= startWeek && currentMeeting.Start <= endWeek) {
           println "Subject: " + currentMeeting.Subject.value
           println "Category: " + currentMeeting.Categories
           println "Duration: " + currentMeeting.Duration.value

           category = currentMeeting.Categories
           durationValue = currentMeeting.Duration.value

           def value = categoryMap.get(category)
           value = value?value:0
           def newValue = value + durationValue
           categoryMap.put(category,newValue);
     }
}

def swing = new groovy.swing.SwingBuilder()
def titleString = 'Time Outlook: ' + String.format('%tm/%<td/%<tY', startWeek) + "-" + String.format('%tm/%<td/%<tY', endWeek)
def frame = swing.frame(title:titleString,
                        defaultCloseOperation:WC.EXIT_ON_CLOSE,
                        size:[800,600], locationRelativeTo: null) {
     borderLayout()
     panel(id:'canvas') { rigidArea(width:700, height:500) }
 }

def bounds = new java.awt.Rectangle(0,0, 700,500).bounds
def piedata = new org.jfree.data.general.DefaultPieDataset()
for(entry in categoryMap)
{
  piedata.setValue entry.key + " = " + entry.value, entry.value
}
def options = [false, true, false]
def chart = ChartFactory.createPieChart(titleString, piedata, *options)
chart.backgroundPaint = java.awt.Color.white
frame.pack()
frame.show()
chart.draw(swing.canvas.graphics, bounds)

Simple enough script... It gets the ActiveXObject for Outlook application. Then from namespace it gets calendarFolder (constant 9). You can find out more about constant here. calFolder contains all the meeting appointmentItems. Once you get to the appointmentItem you can ask for the properties using groovy dot-notation.

Here is the snapshot of the output

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