HOWTO: EWS: Get OOF State for Self or any user in your organization

First thing first, this is just for demonstration purpose and might *not* be a supported solution by Microsoft. The setting we are reading from are hidden messages and not documented anywhere. I had to reverse engineer it for demonstration purpose.

Objective: To get OOF State of any user in your organization.

Challenges: You might ask me why not use GetUserOofSettings to query user’s OOF status with the help of Exchange Impersonation? This is due to the limitation of EWS’s GetUserOofSettings/SetUserOofSettings methods as they don’t support Impersonation.

Workaround: Directly reading the hidden messages from Mailbox Root where this Flag & OOF message is stored. Since we are read-only we should be good to do so, that’s my assumption.

We need to first make a FindItem call to the mailbox root and search for a message with ItemClass = “IPM.Microsoft.OOF.UserOOFSettings”. Assuming that there will be only one message with that message class at any given time, we get its ItemId and make a GetItem call to read the message body. The message body is plain text XML with following structure

 

For OOF enabled…

<UserOofSettings>
<OofState >Enabled</OofState>
</UserOofSettings>

For OOF disabled…

<UserOofSettings>
<OofState >Disabled</OofState>
</UserOofSettings>

There is also a state called SCHEDULED, please refer to the below mentioned article to know more about it

Reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa580465.aspx

This code sample can do the job for you.

 using System;
using GetOOFState.MyEWS;

namespace GetOOFState
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            
            ExchangeServiceBinding esb = new ExchangeServiceBinding();
            esb.Url = "https://server/ews/exchange.asmx";
            esb.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("ServiceAccount", Password", "Domain");

            esb.ExchangeImpersonation = new ExchangeImpersonationType();
            esb.ExchangeImpersonation.ConnectingSID = new ConnectingSIDType();
            esb.ExchangeImpersonation.ConnectingSID.PrimarySmtpAddress = "username@domain.com";
            

            FindItemType fit = new FindItemType();
            fit.ItemShape = new ItemResponseShapeType();
            fit.ItemShape.BaseShape = DefaultShapeNamesType.AllProperties;
            fit.Restriction = new RestrictionType();

            IsEqualToType itemMessageClass = new IsEqualToType();
            
            PathToUnindexedFieldType msgClassProp = new PathToUnindexedFieldType();
            msgClassProp.FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.itemItemClass;

            ConstantValueType msgClassValue = new ConstantValueType();
            msgClassValue.Value = "IPM.Microsoft.OOF.UserOOFSettings";

            itemMessageClass.Item = msgClassProp;
            itemMessageClass.FieldURIOrConstant = new FieldURIOrConstantType();
            itemMessageClass.FieldURIOrConstant.Item = msgClassValue;
            
            
            fit.Restriction = new RestrictionType();
            fit.Restriction.Item = itemMessageClass;

            DistinguishedFolderIdType rootFolder = new DistinguishedFolderIdType();
            rootFolder.Id = DistinguishedFolderIdNameType.root;

            fit.ParentFolderIds = new BaseFolderIdType[] { rootFolder };

            FindItemResponseType firt = esb.FindItem(fit);
            string itemID = ((ArrayOfRealItemsType)((FindItemResponseMessageType)firt.ResponseMessages.Items[0]).RootFolder.Item).Items[0].ItemId.Id;

            GetItemType git = new GetItemType();
            ItemIdType iit = new ItemIdType();
            iit.Id = itemID;

            git.ItemIds = new BaseItemIdType[] { iit };

            git.ItemShape = new ItemResponseShapeType();
            git.ItemShape.BaseShape = DefaultShapeNamesType.IdOnly;

            PathToUnindexedFieldType []propsToFetch = new PathToUnindexedFieldType[1];
            propsToFetch[0] = new PathToUnindexedFieldType();
            propsToFetch[0].FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.itemBody;

            git.ItemShape.AdditionalProperties = propsToFetch;
            
   

            GetItemResponseType girt = esb.GetItem(git);
            ItemType itemOOF = ((ItemType)(((ItemInfoResponseMessageType)girt.ResponseMessages.Items[0]).Items.Items[0]));

            System.Xml.XmlDocument xDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
            xDoc.LoadXml(itemOOF.Body.Value);
            Console.WriteLine("OOF State: {0}", xDoc.GetElementsByTagName("OofState")[0].InnerText);
            

            

        }
    }
}

Happy Coding!!!

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2009
  PingBack from http://microsoft-sharepoint.simplynetdev.com/howto-ews-get-oof-state-for-self-or-any-user-in-your-organization/

• Anonymous
  December 29, 2009
  in your example, is it possible to somehow use the configured credentials from an AppPool for the esb.Credentials? esb.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("ServiceAccount", Password", "Domain");

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2010
  Yes it is esb.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  Hi, how to i activate the checkbox "Only send during this time range" with EWS using your code in C#? Thank you