How to use the Outlook object model to retrieve all recurring appointments (201101)

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In Outlook, you can create a recurring appointment, such as a meeting that occurs every Monday. Using Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) or Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications code, you can do either of the following:

• Use the whole items collections to access all of the appointments.
• Use the Restrict method to retrieve a subset of the appointments.

For example, assume a recurring appointment was originally created on the first Monday in January and the appointment was set to recur on every Monday thereafter. If you do not use the IncludeRecurrences property, the only appointment in January to be returned would be the first Monday. Subsequently, if you retrieve the appointments in February, none of the recurring appointments are retrieved.

When programmatically referring to a group of appointments, these items are part of the Items collection object. Once you have set an object variable to the whole collection of items, you can then use the IncludeRecurrences property to optionally include all the recurring appointments. Next you would typically use the Restrict method if you want to use a subset of the whole collection. Then you could optionally sort the collection.

The following automation example assumes you have already set up one recurring appointment in your calendar and that you have the Calendar folder selected. Because it does not use the Restrict method, it will return all appointments in the Calendar.

Sub GetRecurrences()

   Set myOlApp = New Outlook.Application

   ' Set myItems to all of the items in the folder. The Calendar
   ' folder must be selected before running this code.
   Set myItems = myOlApp.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items

   ' Set the IncludeRecurrences property to make sure all of the
   ' recurring appointments are also included in the collection.
   myItems.IncludeRecurrences = True

   ' Sort the collection based on the start of the appointment.
   myItems.Sort "[Start]"

   ' Display one of the recurring appointments which have been included.
   MsgBox "The fifth instance of the recurring appointment " & _
      "occurs on:" & myItems.Item(5).Start

End Sub