Skip to main content

Basic Powershell script to show appointments from a calendar using the EWS Managed API

One of the more common tasks you might turn to use one of the Exchange API's for is to enumerate appointments in one or more users calendars. This can be useful for a number of reasons and applications and scripts, the EWS Managed API makes getting calendar appointment pretty easy using a script once you understand a few of the fundamentals around how calendar appointment's are stored.

Appointments unlike messages are more complex objects eg where an email would only represent one object in a folder an appointment if its recurring or a recurring exception or a deleted occurrence could represent one more calendar appointments. So its important not just to do a finditems query like you would with Email messages as this will return just the base instances of each appointment object. What you should do when querying for calendar appointments is its important to use a CalendarView, what this means is that when you query for appointments you specify a date range (start and end) for the appointments you what to retrieve and EWS will handle expanding any recurring appointments,deleted occurrences etc and return you what is essentially what you would see in Outlook (which does the same thing). This is a rather simplified explanation if you want to read more check out this sample chapter from Inside Exchange Web Services which is available on MSDN.

So when it comes to putting all this together in Powershell script that will pull all the appointments from a specific calendar we first need to specify the SMTP address of a mailbox you want to access and a Date range you want to check in a few variables

$MailboxName = "gscales@domain.com"
$StartDate = new-object System.DateTime(2009, 08, 01)
$EndDate = new-object System.DateTime(2009, 11, 01)

or maybe you want to look at the appointment for next week

$StartDate = new-object [System.DateTime]::Now
$EndDate = new-object [System.DateTime]::Now.AddDays(7)

Connect to EWS using the currently logged on Credentials the assumes that this account has access to the mailbox is question.

$dllpath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\Web Services\1.0\Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.dll"
[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($dllpath)
$service = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeService([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeVersion]::Exchange2007_SP1)

$windowsIdentity = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
$sidbind = "LDAP://<SID=" + $windowsIdentity.user.Value.ToString() + ">"
$aceuser = [ADSI]$sidbind

$service.AutodiscoverUrl($aceuser.mail.ToString())

Then you need to specify the calendarview object to use

$folderid = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderId([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.WellKnownFolderName]::Calendar,$MailboxName)
$CalendarFolder = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.CalendarFolder]::Bind($service,$folderid)
$cvCalendarview = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.CalendarView($StartDate,$EndDate,2000)

and finally query the calendar and return the appointments

$cvCalendarview.PropertySet = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PropertySet([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.BasePropertySet]::FirstClassProperties)
$frCalendarResult = $CalendarFolder.FindAppointments($cvCalendarview)
foreach ($apApointment in $frCalendarResult.Items){
$psPropset = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PropertySet([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.BasePropertySet]::FirstClassProperties)
$apApointment.load($psPropset)
"Appointment : " + $apApointment.Subject.ToString()
"Start : " + $apApointment.Start.ToString()
"End : " + $apApointment.End.ToString()
"Organizer : " + $apApointment.Organizer.ToString()
"Required Attendees :"
foreach($attendee in $apApointment.RequiredAttendees){
" " + $attendee.Address
}
"Optional Attendees :"
foreach($attendee in $apApointment.OptionalAttendees){
" " + $attendee.Address
}
"Resources :"
foreach($attendee in $apApointment.Resources){
" " + $attendee.Address
}
" "
}

I've put a download of the script here.


Popular posts from this blog

Exporting and Uploading Mailbox Items using Exchange Web Services using the new ExportItems and UploadItems operations in Exchange 2010 SP1

Two new EWS Operations ExportItems and UploadItems where introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 that allowed you to do a number of useful things that where previously not possible using Exchange Web Services. Any object that Exchange stores is basically a collection of properties for example a message object is a collection of Message properties, Recipient properties and Attachment properties with a few meta properties that describe the underlying storage thrown in. Normally when using EWS you can access these properties in a number of a ways eg one example is using the strongly type objects such as emailmessage that presents the underlying properties in an intuitive way that's easy to use. Another way is using Extended Properties to access the underlying properties directly. However previously in EWS there was no method to access every property of a message hence there is no way to export or import an item and maintain full fidelity of every property on that item (you could export the...

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Gr...

Sending a Message in Exchange Online via REST from an Arduino MKR1000

This is part 2 of my MKR1000 article, in this previous post  I looked at sending a Message via EWS using Basic Authentication.  In this Post I'll look at using the new Outlook REST API  which requires using OAuth authentication to get an Access Token. The prerequisites for this sketch are the same as in the other post with the addition of the ArduinoJson library  https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson  which is used to parse the Authentication Results to extract the Access Token. Also the SSL certificates for the login.windows.net  and outlook.office365.com need to be uploaded to the devices using the wifi101 Firmware updater. To use Token Authentication you need to register an Application in Azure https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/add-common-consent-manually  with the Mail.Send permission. The application should be a Native Client app that use the Out of Band Callback urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob. You ...
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.