Web Store API Stack For Exchange 2000

Web Store presents a new set of application interfaces and protocols (OLE DB, Active Data Objects [ADO], and Collaboration Data Objects [CDO]) with many advantages over the old MAPI-based store. While the number of APIs can appear daunting, they are all related-they simply provide different levels of abstraction of the underlying Web Store data.

OLE DB, Microsoft’s standard low-level data access API for its own developers and commercial ISVs, provides access to the folders, files, items, events, properties, and methods of the constituents of Web Store. OLE DB converts the idiosyncratic details of the Web Store objects into a standardized set of methods and properties that can be reused by ADO. Developers should use the OLE DB interface when speed is exceptionally critical or to get at some implementation detail that is not replicated into higher program models (such as event methods, which are available only through OLE DB).

ADO, the dominant data access API for application developers programming to Web Store, applies to all of the Microsoft database types, as well as to third-party databases that support OLE DB providers (interface layers between specific store implementations and the OLE DB API ). Many developers are familiar with ADO and can quickly use the ADO data model for manipulating the Web Store. As a data-centric API, ADO presents store contents as recordsets (where the results look like a table), records (rows in a table), fields (columns in a table), and streams (the entire object, as a stream of bits). Web Store offers enhancements to standard ADO queries to support queries against the Web Store contents (including its content index). Developers should use ADO especially when they want to retrieve records to create lists or table-like views of the Store contents (such as to populate Web forms).