Custom Properties

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Although the Web Store provides a large number of supplied properties used for standard applications, you can store any number of additional properties along with each item. Each item can have a completely different set of custom properties. That is, unlike a relational database, you do not have to predefine what properties can be stored along with a particular item.

The Web Store schema is not about constraints for maintaining relational integrity, but as a means for applications to discover all or a desired set of properties as well as for ascertaining the nature of a folder’s items.

You can create custom properties in two ways:

• Append a field to the Fields collection of an ADO Record object of a Web Store item, as shown in the programming task Setting and Retrieving Custom Properties. The ADO Append method requires only a name for the property and a data type.
• Create an item for a property definition in a schema folder and specify its content class and other schema settings. The Fields collection of a Record object for an item in a folder configured for those property definitions will contain the new properties.

A custom property without a schema, using only the Append method, is persisted with the item but may not be visible to an SQL SELECT * statement run in the scope of the parent folder. To make your properties visible to SELECT statements, they must belong to a content class attributed to the parent folder.

Custom properties are visible to MAPI applications because they reside in the PS_PUBLIC_STRINGS MAPI property namespace.

See Also

Web Store Schema

Custom Properties and MAPI.