Retrieve calendar items (Outlook API, WebDAV) displaying strange behaviour

📅 Strange Behavior with Retrieving Calendar Items 🤔

Are you experiencing strange behavior when retrieving calendar items in Outlook? 🤷‍♂️ Don't worry, you're not alone! Many developers like you have faced common issues with the Outlook API and WebDAV while working on projects like MS Outlook plugins. 🖥️📆

Let's dive into the specific problem you're facing and provide easy solutions to get your calendar items back on track! 💪

The Problem 🤨

In your case, you are trying to retrieve all appointments between certain dates in Outlook calendars. However, you are encountering two different problems depending on the approach you take.

1️⃣ Outlook API: When using the standard logic described in the MSDN documentation, you are sorting items by [Start], setting IncludeRecurrences to True, and running a Find\Restrict query over calendar items. While this works fine in your test environment, in your customer's environment, recurring appointments have their start and end dates set to the corresponding dates of a "master appointment." This means that when you try to find all items in August, you may get recurring appointments from January with the incorrect start and end dates in the results. However, Outlook displays the correct dates in the same calendar. 🗓️🔍

2️⃣ WebDAV: In an attempt to solve the first problem, you decide to use WebDAV. You follow the code from the documentation and try to query all items from the calendar. Initially, this solves the issue of incorrect start and end dates for recurring appointments. However, a new problem arises – you don't get any recurring items that were created more than approximately six months ago. There are no parameters to restrict the retrieval of these "old" items. 😫📅

Possible Solutions 🛠️

1️⃣ Outlook API: To address the problem with incorrect start and end dates for recurring appointments, consider modifying your approach. Instead of relying solely on the "master appointment" start and end dates, try incorporating the RecurrencePattern to calculate the correct dates for each recurring appointment. This way, you can ensure that the retrieved items have the accurate start and end dates. 🔄🗓️

2️⃣ WebDAV: To overcome the limitation of not retrieving recurring items older than approximately six months, you might consider adjusting your query. Try using different filtering parameters or directly accessing the Exchange server to retrieve the desired items. Additionally, make sure to check whether there are any configuration settings on your Exchange server that might limit the retrieval of older recurring items. 🗄️📅

Technical Details ⚙️

The specific technical details of your setup are as follows:

• Exchange: Exchange 2003

• Outlook: Outlook 2003-2010

It's worth mentioning that enabling Cached Exchange Mode might resolve the first error you encountered, but if you can't do that, it's important to explore other solutions. 💡🏪

Updates and Insights 💡🔍

During your investigation, you discovered some interesting updates and insights:

Update 1: Further research using OutlookSpy revealed that the issue lies within the Outlook API itself. When Cached Exchange Mode is turned off, the Start and End dates retrieved by the API are incorrect. However, somehow Outlook developers managed to display the correct dates in the calendars. How did they achieve this mysterious feat? If you have any insights or information on this, please share with us! 🤔🔎

Update 2: Outlook Support Escalation Engineer has confirmed that this is a problem within the Outlook product itself. It's unfortunate that you encountered a bug, but rest assured that it's not due to any mistakes in your code. We hope that they will address and resolve this issue soon. 🐛🔧

Let's Collaborate! 👥💡

Have you faced similar issues with retrieving calendar items in Outlook? Do you have any creative workarounds or solutions to share? We would love to hear from you and encourage you to join the conversation by leaving a comment below! Let's collaborate and help each other navigate through these calendar item challenges seamlessly. 🙌🗣️

Remember, glitches and bugs are all part of the technological journey, but with a strong community, we can find innovative ways to overcome them! Together, let's make Outlook calendar retrieval an effortless and reliable process. 🌟💼

Stay tuned for more tech tips, tricks, and troubleshooting content! 🚀✨