Getting Appointments on a specific date from Outlook

I was working on proof of concept Outlook add-in for a customer when I ran into  series of distressing exceptions trying to access specific recurring appointments from the calendar. There seems to be a great many ways to get a list of appointments for a specific date, but you may find the .Start date of these vary wildly. I went down a path using GetRecurrencePattern().GetOccurrence(DateTime.Now), and I got this exception a LOT:

“You changed one of the recurrences of this item, and this instance no longer exists. Close any open items and try again.”

After doing some more searching, I found that I was going about it all wrong. Now, I will be the first to say that I am not the strongest in the Outlook Object Model. Excel, Word and especially PowerPoint are by bread and butter. But sometimes, Outlook can be just downright confusing. Disappointed smile

In the end, this is what I came up with to get a list of all the appointments on a given date in a specific users calendar that you select from the Address list:

Outlook.Recipient LobjRecipient = null;
// crete a select names dialog
Outlook.SelectNamesDialog LobjSnd = MobjOutlook.Session.GetSelectNamesDialog();
// limit to the TO box
LobjSnd.NumberOfRecipientSelectors = Outlook.OlRecipientSelectors.olShowTo;
LobjSnd.AllowMultipleSelection = false; // there can be only one
LobjSnd.Display(); // display it
// do we have resolved names
if (!LobjSnd.Recipients.ResolveAll())
{
LobjRecipient = null; // NO
return; // exit out
}
else
{
LobjRecipient = LobjSnd.Recipients[1]; // yes
}
LobjSnd = null;
// open the shares Calendar folder
Outlook.MAPIFolder LobjFolder = MobjOutlook.ActiveExplorer().Session.GetSharedDefaultFolder(
LobjRecipient, Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderCalendar)
as Outlook.MAPIFolder;
// get all the items
Outlook.Items LobjItems = LobjFolder.Items;
LobjItems.Sort("[Start]"); // sort the items by start date
LobjItems.IncludeRecurrences = true; // be sure to include recurrences
string LstrDay = DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString(); // today
// set the find string to today 0:00 to 23:59:59
string LstrFind = "[Start] <= \"" + LstrDay + " 11:59 PM\"" +
" AND [End] > \"" + LstrDay + " 12:00 AM\"";
// find the first appointment for the day
Outlook.AppointmentItem LobjAppt = LobjItems.Find(LstrFind);
while (LobjAppt != null)
{
// ...do your thing here...

// get the next item
LobjAppt = LobjItems.FindNext();
}

Outlook Calendar Cleaner

I encountered an odd problem while working with a customer that was porting from Lotus Notes to Office 365 (Exchange) and ended up creating a new tool called the Outlook Calendar Cleaner.

The customer had a mixed environment of Mac and Windows and in certain conditions appointment items were disappearing on the Mac Office Outlook calendar, but still appearing in Outlook Web Access (OWA) and if the delegate was in Windows, they would still see the appointment on their view of the owners calendar.

The issue turns out to be that in the conversion a multi-line subject in an appointment item (supported in Lotus, but not in Exchange), has the new line character converted to a start of text (SOT) character or ASCII code 0x02. The problem is that this is an invalid character in XML and the Exchange Web Services implementation on Mac O/S X does not properly parse this character. This causes the process to hang and all appointments which were being imported on that thread are not copied over. Net effect – they appear to be missing in Mac Outlook.

So, I created a tool to correct the problem. The Outlook Calendar Cleaner is a very specific tool targeting this problem. You can to open the users Exchange Account (Office 365 account) in Outlook 2010 for Windows and run the tool in Windows and it will clean any appointments found to have this special character.

I have posted the Outlook Calendar Cleaner tool on Codeplex (along with the source code). Here:

https://outlookcalendarclean.codeplex.com/