OL2000: How to Delete Items in a Collection

ID: Q222480

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Outlook 2000

SUMMARY

This article describes common scenarios and considerations to take into account when programming with collections.

MORE INFORMATION

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If you want to programmatically delete all of the members of a collection, there are a few approaches that will work but there are also a number of approaches that will not work. Unexpected results occur because a collection is changing as you delete members in it and the collection is not updated dynamically. Typically you will find that every other item in the collection is deleted.

The following automation code example exhibits this behavior. Before running this code, create a subfolder of your Inbox called Test and copy (not move) some items into the folder so that they can be deleted.


Sub DeleteItems()
   Set ol = New Outlook.Application
   Set olns = ol.GetNamespace("MAPI")
   Set TestFolder = olns.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox).Folders("Test")
   Set TestItems = TestFolder.Items
   For Each Itm In TestItems
      Itm.Delete
   Next
End Sub

To delete all items in a collection, delete the items from the collection in reverse order using the following approach:


Sub DeleteItems()
   Set ol = New Outlook.Application
   Set olns = ol.GetNamespace("MAPI")
   Set TestFolder = olns.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox).Folders("test")
   Set TestItems = TestFolder.Items
   NumItems = TestItems.Count
   For I = NumItems To 1 Step -1
      TestItems(I).Delete
   Next
End Sub

If you need to delete a single item from a collection and want to make sure the collection is properly indexed, you may need to retrieve the collection of items again. In the example above, the following line of code retrieves the items from the folder again:


Set TestItems = TestFolder.Items

REFERENCES

For additional information about available resources and answers to commonly asked questions about Microsoft Outlook 2000 solutions, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q146636 OL2000: Questions About Custom Forms and Outlook Solutions

Additional query words: OutSol OutSol2000

Keywords : kbdta
Version : WINDOWS:2000
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbhowto