Saving and Loading Views in Outlook 2000

[Duncan]

I am developing a COM AddIn for Outlook. It needs to run with Outlook 2000, Outlook XP and Outlook 2003

Part of the functionality is to define custom views for some folders I create. I would then like to be able to save the definitons of the views to a file and restore them later

In Outlook XP and Outlook 2003 this is no problem. I save/restore the XML definition of the view from/to the appropriately named XML property of the View object. This does not exist in Outlook 2000. When I try and access the view through the Explorer object, I get nothing returned, even if I have created a custom view

Is this possible, and if so can anyone point out the way

Thanks

 

[Wei-Dong Xu [MSFT]]

Hi duncan,

Thanks for posting in the community!

From my understanding, you are going to build one COM Add-in to create one
customized view for some folders in Outlook 2000, XP and 2003. Your codes
work very well in Outlook XP and 2003. There is some problem occured in
Outlook 2000.

So far as I know, Outlook XP and 2003 supports the creation and
customization of View very well. However, Outlook 2000 object model doesn't
provide any methods to create or customize the view. If you want to create
or customize the view in Outlook 2000, you will have to use the Exchange
SDK to create the older Exchange views. Outlook 2000 supports the old
Exchange view for compatibility. The kb article 262294 will introduce more
information for you on this issue.
262294 OL2000: Cannot Programmatically Create or Modify Views
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=262294

If you have any further question, please feel free to let me know. I am
standing by to be of assistance.

Have a nice day!

Wei-Dong Xu
Microsoft Product Support Services
Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Tom Rizzo [MSFT]]

Other thing you may want to try is create your view in a newer version of
Outlook. When you save it Exchange, older versions of Outlook should work
with the view.

 

[Duncan]

The key info is all in the knowledge base article referenced

262294 OL2000: Cannot Programmatically Create or Modify View
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=26229

I failed to find it originally in my search, but it exactly addresses the issue. Thanks for the pointer

There is just one bit of experience I can add. The article suggests that you create a pst file with your custom folders and views and then use the copy method in your AddIN to take them out of the pst file and into your personal folders. The only way to create a pst file that I know about is using the Export function on Outlook's File menu. However, this does not copy the custom views when it creates the folders in the output pst file. So I created the pst file using the export feature, then attached to it using the options menu and by hand from the folders list copied my folders into the pst file. In this case my views were all copied along with the folders into the pst file, and when my AddIn copies these folders from the pst file into my Outlook 2000 personal folder, presto, the custom views are there