Property Names and XML

Topic Last Modified: 2006-06-11

When an application accesses an Exchange store property by using the WebDAV protocol, the property name, when placed in an XML stream, is disassembled into its namespace and name parts. When the property name is taken out of the XML stream, it is reassembled and then saved to the item in the Exchange store. This happens transparently within the WebDAV service itself. The following rules are used to identify the namespace and the name portions of a fully qualified property name when disassembling it for transport using HTTP.

• Valid URL and Uniform Resource Name (URN) schema-separator characters, which delimit namespace names from property names, are as follows: forward slash (/), colon (:), semicolon (;), number sign (#), question mark (?).
  When disassembling a property name into a namespace Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and a local name, the string is scanned from right to left until one of the characters listed in the preceding paragraph is found.
• If the separator character is the number sign (#), the namespace is the entire string to the left of the character. The property name is the string to the right of it.
• If the separator is not the number sign, the namespace name is the entire string to the left of the property name. The property name is the string to the right of the separator character.

The following table shows how a fully qualified property name is disassembled into its parts.

Namespace	Name	Full name
urn:schemas-microsoft-com:	prop1	urn:schemas-microsoft-com:prop1
https://microsoft.com/schema	prop2	https://microsoft.com/schema#prop2
http://exchange.microsoft.com/schema/	prop3	http://exchange.microsoft.com/schema/prop3
urn:property#	prop4	urn:property##prop4
urn:property?	prop5	urn:property?prop5