Suppose, for a moment, that your company has a public Outlook folder that contains a bunch of contacts, and you want to synchronize your local contacts folder with this public folder, maybe so you could conveniently synchronize your PDA as well.  But you don’t want all of the contacts in the public folder, just certain ones.  Furthermore, you want to keep this list up-to-date with a push of a button.  How would you go about it?

You might think this is a simple problem, but the particulars of your setup might require a more complex solution than you originally suspected.  In this posting, I will give some advice on completing this task and even present a useful function that isn’t normally available.

DISCLAIMER

This posting and the accompanying code within are presented in the hope that they may be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.  AppVenture, Inc. is not liable for any results of using this code, especially if you run it, without testing, on a production system.

The Setup

Let’s describe the specifics of our situation before we get started.  Mail is accessed from an Exchange server through Outlook 2003.  The Exchange server contains a public folder (called “ContactFolderName”) that contains Contacts.  A user may mark certain contacts for synchronization; this is stored in the “Categories” field as a list of comma-separated usernames, one for each interested user.  Contacts also contain an ID, stored in the field User4. Why User4?  It’s unobtrusive and unlikely to already be used—but if it is being used for something else, pick another field.

Most users have only create, read and update permissions on this folder – no delete.  Administrators, however, will also be using this program, so we must act as if the user does have delete permission.

Our objective is to write a plugin that finds the marked contacts and copies them to our local contacts folder, updating them if they were already present.  We must avoid duplicates everywhere and must never delete from the public folder.

Our development environment is Visual Studio 2005, using Visual Basic and the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). 

Creating an Outlook Addin

This posting won’t address how to create an addin for Outlook because there are plenty of articles that address just that. (See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=302901 ).  It assumes that you have already created the infrastructure needed, i.e., there is a button that, when clicked, calls btnLaunch_Click (below).

Finding the desired contacts

Before we can copy any contacts, we have to find the ones we’re interested in, and before we can do that, we have to get their folder.  Fortunately, getting the folder is easy, because we know right where it is: \\Public Folders\All Public Folders\ContactFolderName . So, first we get the namespace, and then we create the publicFolder variable as a MAPIFolder, and get the public contact folder from the namespace (with a little error handling just in case).

Next, we have to look through the folder to find the items we want.  There are several ways of doing this.  We could loop through every item in the folder, but that’s expensive and slow when there are thousands of contacts in the folder.  We could use a Find, but find can’t perform ‘like’ searches, meaning we’d still have to iterate through a bunch of items.

Instead, we’re going to get a little more complex, and create an AdvancedSearch (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa220071(office.11).aspx ).  Getting the path is easy – just ask the folder for it, and don’t forget the single quotes! – but determining the field for the filter can be much harder because the schema is pretty large, and not all the names in the schema correspond to ContactItem property names.  Fortunately, there’s an easy way to determine what to use.  Start up Outlook and go to any folder.  Right-click on the background of the folder and choose “Filter…”.  Go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and choose the field you want; in our case, “All Contact Fields” -> “Categories”.  Then, choose your criterion (“contains”), fill in the value and hit ‘Add to List’.  Next, click on the “SQL” tab and then check “Edit these criteria directly.”  There it is!  Copy this straight into the code and replace the value as above in the code, and pay attention to the quotation marks. (You can close Outlook now).

Public Sub btnLaunch_Click(ByVal Ctrl As CommandBarButton, ByRef CancelDefault As Boolean) Handles btnLaunch.Click

  	Dim namespace As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.NameSpace

  	namespace = applicationObject.Session 

        Dim publicFolder As MAPIFolder = Nothing
 

        Try
            publicFolder = namespace.Folders("Public Folders").Folders("All Public Folders").Folders("ContactFolderName")
        Catch ex As COMException
            MessageBox.Show("Unable to find Contact folder", "Missing Folder", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error)
            Throw ex
        End Try
 

        Dim filter As String = """urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords"" LIKE '%" + _

            namespace.CurrentUser.Name + "%'"
 

        Dim search As Search = applicationObject.AdvancedSearch("'" + publicFolder.FolderPath + "'", filter)

End Sub

Retrieving the Search Results

All well and good, you say.  But our previous function ended a bit abruptly, and we haven’t accomplished our goal yet!  Fear not, for now it is time to ProcessSearchResults.

We ended our btnLaunch_Click function seemingly prematurely for a very good reason: to give the AdvancedSearch time to complete.  Because AdvancedSearches run in the background, if we had tried to get the results right away, we might have missed some, or even gotten none at all!  Fortunately, AdvancedSearch fires an event when it’s finished: AdvancedSearchComplete, so all we have to do is have our ProcessSearchResults function handle it, and our addin will proceed when it’s done.

NOTE: Other addins or even the user could run AdvancedSearches that would cause ProcessSearchResults to execute, so you should use a tag – which this code does not – to ensure you’re getting the right search back.  See the link on AdvancedSearch above for more information.

We again get ahold of the namespace and then we ask for the results of the search. Then, we find our destination folder (our local contacts folder, in this case) and use ClearContactsFromFolder to delete the old contacts from it.  We ensure that it’s only the public folder contacts by checking to see if the contact has a non-empty User4 field.

Private Sub ProcessSearchResults(ByVal SearchObject As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Search) Handles applicationObject.AdvancedSearchComplete

        namespace = applicationObject.Session

        Dim searchResults As Results = SearchObject.Results
        Dim contactsFolder As MAPIFolder = namespace.Folders("Mailbox - " + _namespace.CurrentUser.Name).Folders("Contacts")

        ClearContactsFromFolder(contactsFolder)

        CopyContactsToFolder(searchResults, contactsFolder)

        While Marshal.ReleaseComObject(SearchObject) > 0

        End While

        SearchObject = Nothing

        MessageBox.Show("Contacts Synchronized!")
End Sub

Public Sub ClearContactsFromFolder(ByRef folder As MAPIFolder)

        Dim itemInFolder As Object = Nothing

        For Each itemInFolder In folder.Items
            Try
                If Not itemInFolder Is Nothing Then
                    Dim itemclass As OlObjectClass
                    itemclass = CType(itemInFolder.class, OlObjectClass)
                    If itemclass = OlObjectClass.olContact Then
                        Dim newOlContactItem As ContactItem = CType(itemInFolder, ContactItem)

                        If Not newOlContactItem.User4 Is Nothing And Not newOlContactItem.User4 = String.Empty Then
                            newOlContactItem.Delete()
                        End If
                    End If
                End If
            Catch
            End Try
       Next
End Sub

Then, we copy the contacts to our destination folder using CopyContactsToFolder (see below for code and discussion) and notify the user that we’re done!

Copying contacts is a pain when accessing Outlook programmatically.  For some reason, although ContactItem has a Copy function, it only copies to the same folder.  Now, if we had full permissions on the public folder, this could work, because we could create a copy of the ContactItem and then Move it to our desired folder.  Unfortunately, a Move is a copy followed by a delete, but we don’t have delete permissions on this folder in all cases! 

Strangely, and don’t try this at home, a Move that fails due to delete permissions results in a folder-to-folder copy!  Why not use that?  Two reasons: first, some users will have permission to delete, and we don’t want to remove things from the public folder, and second, although we could perform another copy-and-move if we detected that the user had delete permissions, this is trouble just waiting for a network outage.

So, what is the solution?  Create a new ContactItem in a folder the user controls (their default contacts folder), copy all the values over, and move it to the destination folder (the same in our particular case, but it doesn’t have to be).  And that’s what CopyContactsToFolder does: it takes in a results object, goes through each one, creates a new instance, copies over all the fields, saves the new instance and moves it to the desired folder.  It’s a doozy, but it copies every ContactItem field available (and that can be assigned to) in the ContactItem interface.

A brief note on why ‘item’ is an Object and not a ContactItem: the search results that I dealt with when originally writing this addin contained items that acted like ContactItems for all intents and purposes, but couldn’t be cast into the ContactItem class.  So, they’re just plain Objects in this code; if you’re certain that all your results will be ContactItems, feel free to change this (it will certainly get rid of a lot of warnings about late binding!).

Copying Contacts

(Download source for entire function)

Public Sub CopyContactsToFolder(ByRef contacts As Results, ByRef folder As MAPIFolder)
        Dim item As Object
        For Each item In contacts
            Try 
                Dim newItem As ContactItem = _
                    CType(applicationObject.CreateItem(OlItemType.olContactItem), ContactItem) 
                newItem.Account = item.Account
                newItem.Anniversary = item.Anniversary
                newItem.AssistantName = item.AssistantName
		.
		.
		.
	      newItem.UserCertificate = item.UserCertificate
                newItem.WebPage = item.WebPage
                newItem.YomiCompanyName = item.YomiCompanyName
                newItem.YomiFirstName = item.YomiFirstName
                newItem.YomiLastName = item.YomiLastName
 
                newItem.Save()
 
                If Not folder Is _namespace.GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts) Then
                    newItem.Move(folder)
                End If
 
            Catch
            End Try
        Next
    End Sub

ContactSync.vb (11.15 KB)