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Writing a Hierarchy Viewer

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Applies to: Outlook 2013 | Outlook 2016

A hierarchy viewer is a user interface component that is used for displaying folder and address book container hierarchy tables. Hierarchy viewers can display members of the hierarchy at different levels, expanding and contracting each level on demand.

The container property, PR_DEPTH (PidTagDepth), controls the level at which a hierarchy member is displayed. Entries that represent top-level address book containers or folders have their PR_DEPTH property set to zero. The value of this property is incremented sequentially for entries in sequential levels. That is, when a user selects a top-level container to expand, display all containers with PR_DEPTH set to 1. When a user expands one of these subcontainers, display the containers with PR_DEPTH set to 2, and so on.

Hierarchy viewers support a different range of depths. You can limit your viewer to only one or two levels or you can support multiple levels, if displaying an expansive hierarchy is a priority.

The address book provides a hierarchy viewer for the top-level containers in the address book.

To access the address book hierarchy table

  1. Call IAddrBook::OpenEntry, passing a null entry identifier, to open the address book's root container.

  2. Call the root container's IMAPIContainer::GetHierarchyTable method to access the hierarchy table of the MAPI address book.

To access the default message store's hierarchy table

  1. Call IMAPISession::GetMsgStoresTable to access the message store table.

  2. Build a restriction using the SPropertyRestriction structure to limit the table to only those rows that have a PR_DEFAULT_STORE (PidTagDefaultStore) property set to TRUE.

  3. Call IMAPITable::FindRow, passing it the SPropertyRestriction, to locate the row representing the default message store.

  4. Call IMAPISession::OpenEntry, passing in the PR_ENTRYID (PidTagEntryId) property from the default message store's row in the message store table.

  5. Call the message store's IMAPIProp::GetProps method to retrieve the PR_IPM_SUBTREE_ENTRYID (PidTagIpmSubtreeEntryId) property.

  6. Call the message store's IMsgStore::OpenEntry method, passing the PR_IPM_SUBTREE_ENTRYID property, to open the root folder of the message store's IPM subtree.

  7. Call the IPM root folder's IMAPIContainer::GetHierarchyTable method to access its hierarchy table.