GoldMine doesn’t have the ability to store ‘favourite’ records and return to them, so we thought it would be interesting to find a way of adding it.

GoldMine does of course have the ‘recently visited’ list, but that isn’t the same thing at all.

It actually turned out to be very simple, thanks to the GoldMine API.

The following VBS script is all that’s required:

Dim gmUI, xmlReturn, index, target, i

index = Wscript.Arguments(0)

For i = 1 to Wscript.Arguments.Count – 1
target = target + Wscript.Arguments(i) + ” ”
next

set gmUI = CreateObject(“GMW.UI”)

xmlReturn = gmUI.ExecuteCommand(“setorder“+index+”“)

xmlReturn = gmUI.ExecuteCommand(“seek“+target+”“)

Tbe script takes two command line parameters. The first of these is the name of a GoldMine index (contcomp for company, contname for contact) and the second is the name that you’re looking for.

What we wanted to do was to call this from a taskbar entry in GoldMine but that’s where we hit a small snag: GoldMine can’t call scripts, only executables. No matter – there are a number of free utilities to create executables from scripts, and we used one called (simply enough!) ExeFromVBS.

The resultant program can be found at the bottom of this post, or in the downloads area of the website.

To use it:

1. Simply place favourites.exe somewhere accessible on the network.

2. Show the taskbar in GoldMine if it’s not already visible (right click on the toolbar and put a tick next to ‘taskbar’).

3. Create a new group in the taskbar called ‘Favourites’ (or feel free to name it anything else you like).

4. Right click and select ‘add new item’

5. Select ‘external application’ from the dropdown.

6. You need to enter three things:

a) the name that will appear in the taskbar
b) the path to favourites.exe (see step 1)
c) the two command line parameters, for example:

contcomp FrontRange Solutions
or
contname Fred Bloggs

Download favourites.zip