Web folder items in the ShBrowseForFolder dialog box may not display external changes (831944)

CAUSE

By using the BIF_BROWSEINCLUDEURLS flag in the BROWSEINFO structure, the SHBrowseForFolder dialog box can be used to view Web folder locations. The SHBrowseForFolder dialog box does this by using the Microsoft Office Shell Namespace Extension (MSONSEXT) and then enumerates the shell folder items that the SHBrowseForFolder dialog box returns for a particular Web folder. MSONSEXT relies on other components to obtain this information from the server. MSONSEXT relies on Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Internet Publishing (MSDAIPP) and Microsoft FrontPage Web Extender Client (WEC).

By default, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services use FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) for authoring Web folders. When a client connection is made to an FPSE controlled share, the client typically caches the Web site information for the WEC session. Additionally, the client synchronizes with the server when explicitly told to do so. This behavior is different from SharePoint Portal Server 2001 that is based on Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV). SharePoint Portal Server 2001 does not cache the data on the client. The new behavior increases overall performance, but the new behavior does disconnect the client view from whatever changes are being made on the server. If you change the folder structure by some external means, those changes do not appear in the host application unless the session is restarted or unless WEC is instructed to update the cache.

The MSONSEXT extension can instruct WEC to update the cache if you press F5. However, the SHBrowseForFolder dialog box does not use the IShellView interface that is provided by the MSONSEXT extension. Therefore, you cannot press F5 from the ShBrowseForFolder dialog box to update the cache.