accessing contacts in mapifolder way too slow

[Kurt Häusler]

Hi.

I have am using c# and the outlook object model to access the outlook
address book, but once you have more than a 100 or so contacts in the
folder it takes far too long to iterate through them. When theres 3000
contacts in there it takes a whole minute to iterate through them. My
Code is at the end of the post. You can see I have commented out the
dialog box filling section, to see that thats not causing the slowdown,
its the contact = (Outlook.ContactItem) contactItems.Item (counter);
that seems to be slowing things down.

I know it can be done faster because Outlook itself gets all contacts in
its window instantly, and if one uses the mapi32.dll from c++ for
example with MAPILogonEx , OpenAddressBook, and IAddrBook::Address the
contacts appear instantly too. (I cant do this however as I dont want
the default outlook supplied UI)

Any suggestions as to a quicker way to get the contacts in?

Heres my code, its pretty standard copied out of the newsgroups stuff:

private void
GetInfo ()
{
string contactFolderName;
string entryIdFolder;
string entryIdStore;
Outlook.MAPIFolder contactsFolder;
Outlook.Items contactItems;
Outlook.ContactItem contact;

Outlook.NameSpaceClass nameSpace =
(Outlook.NameSpaceClass) oa.GetNamespace ("mapi");
nameSpace.Logon (Environment.UserName, "", true, true);

// Here we need to let the user choose a folder.

//contactsFolder = nameSpace.PickFolder();
try
{
if (Application.UserAppDataRegistry.GetValue ("ContactsFolder") !=
null)
{
// Bits related to registry reading snipped
contactsFolder =
nameSpace.GetFolderFromID (entryIdFolder, entryIdStore);
}
else
{
contactsFolder =
nameSpace.GetDefaultFolder (Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.
olFolderContacts);
}
}
// Catch snipped
contactItems = contactsFolder.Items;

int counter = 0;

ContactPicker cp = new ContactPicker ();

for (counter = 1; counter <= contactItems.Count; counter++)
{
contact = (Outlook.ContactItem) contactItems.Item (counter);
//message = contact.FullName;
//System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(message);
//contact.Display(true);
/*
ListViewItem newItem = new ListViewItem(contact.FullName,
counter-1);

newItem.SubItems.Add(contact.MailingAddressPostalC ode);
newItem.SubItems.Add(contact.MailingAddressCity);
newItem.SubItems.Add(contact.MailingAddressStreet) ;
newItem.SubItems.Add(contact.BusinessTelephoneNumb er);
newItem.SubItems.Add(contact.HomeTelephoneNumber);
newItem.SubItems.Add(contact.MobileTelephoneNumber );
newItem.SubItems.Add(contact.BusinessFaxNumber);

cp.lstContacts.Items.Add(newItem);
//Console.WriteLine(contact.FullName);
*/

}
cp.lstContacts.Sorting = System.Windows.Forms.SortOrder.Ascending;
cp.lstContacts.Sort ();

cp.Show ();

nameSpace.Logoff ();

contactItems = null;
contactsFolder = null;
nameSpace = null;
oa = null;
//return null;
}

[cribe]

Hi,

I too have noticed that getting contact data is slow. But have you noticed that setting it is extremely slow for phone numbers! I am testing a C++ Com Add-in and am synchronizing contacts from a server to Outlook. My bottleneck is the darn contact phone number entries it takes 1 to 2 seconds per entry! :mad:

Have you seen this problem before? Do you have any suggestions?
(Under outlook 2003 the problem is more apparent!)
Thanks in advance!
Chris

[cribe]

Hi again,

I found the solution/workaround to my problem(s): Performance and the deleted items not showing the correct parent. Well in C++ anyway.

What I did was create a new instance of Outlook withing the plugin and get the MAPI namespace from there. That solves the deleted items not deleting and is a heck of a lot quicker since it does not seem to trigger the Tapi32.dll and Rtutils.dll (Telephony stuff).

//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
// This is the correct method of connecting to the outlook model
// (MAPI + new Outlook instance) this method is faster than using the
// application reference passed to the plugin. This seems to be because
// no default outlook automation occurs in this state.
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
_ApplicationPtr objOutlook("Outlook.Application");
objOutlook.CreateInstance(__uuidof(Application));
objOutlook->GetNamespace(CComBSTR("MAPI"),&olNs);


Hope that solves your problem too.
Chris