I am writing a Java program that interacts with Microsoft Outlook using the Jacob library (bridges COM and Java). This program creates a new MailItem, displaying its Inspector window to the user. I wish to subscribe to the inspector's Close event to know when the user is finished editing their mail item.

To subscribe to the event, I followed the instructions in Jacob's documentation (about ²⁄₃ down the page):

The current [event] model is conceptually similar to the Visual Basic WithEvents construct. Basically, I provide a class called com.jacob.com.DispatchEvents which has a constructor that takes a source object (of type com.jacob.com.Dispatch) and a target object (of any type). The source object is queried for its IConnectionPointContainer interface and I attempt to obtain an IConnectionPoint for its default source interface (which I obtain from IProvideClassInfo). At the same time, I also create a mapping of DISPID's for the default source interface to the actual method names. I then use the method names to get jmethodID handles from the target Java object. All event methods currently must have the same signature: one argument which is a Java array of Variants, and a void return type.

Here is my InspectorEventHandler class, conforming to Jacob's documentation:

public class InspectorEventHandler {

    public void Activate(Variant[] arguments) {

    }

    public void BeforeMaximize(Variant[] arguments) {

    }

    public void BeforeMinimize(Variant[] arguments) {

    }

    public void BeforeMove(Variant[] arguments) {

    }

    public void BeforeSize(Variant[] arguments) {

    }

    public void Close(Variant[] arguments) {
        System.out.println("Closing");
    }

    public void Deactivate(Variant[] arguments) {

    }

    public void PageChange(Variant[] arguments) {

    }

}

And here is how I subscribe to the events using this InspectorEventHandler class:

Object outlook = new ActiveXComponent("Outlook.Application");
Object mailItem = Dispatch.call(outlook, "CreateItem", 0).getDispatch();
Object inspector = Dispatch.get(mailItem, "GetInspector").getDispatch();

InspectorEventHandler eventHandler = new InspectorEventHandler();

// This supposedly registers eventHandler with the inspector
new DispatchEvents((Dispatch) inspector, eventHandler);

However, the last line fails with the following exception:

Exception in thread "main" com.jacob.com.ComFailException: Can't find event iid
    at com.jacob.com.DispatchEvents.init(Native Method)
    at com.jacob.com.DispatchEvents.(DispatchEvents.java)
    at cake.CakeApplication.run(CakeApplication.java:30)
    at cake.CakeApplication.main(CakeApplication.java:15)
couldn't get IProvideClassInfo

According to Google, a few others have also received this error. Unfortunately, none of them have received an answer.

I am using version 1.7 of the Jacob library, which claims to prevent this problem:

Version 1.7 also includes code to read the type library directly from the progid. This makes it possible to work with all the Microsoft Office application events, as well as IE5 events. For an example see the samples/test/IETest.java example.

I noticed that the aforementioned IETest.java file subscribes to events like this:

new DispatchEvents((Dispatch) ieo, ieE,"InternetExplorer.Application.1");

Therefore, I tried subscribing to my events in a similar manner:

new DispatchEvents((Dispatch) inspector, eventHandler, "Outlook.Application");
new DispatchEvents((Dispatch) inspector, eventHandler, "Outlook.Application.1");
new DispatchEvents((Dispatch) inspector, eventHandler, "Outlook.Application.12");

All these attempts failed with the same error.