Article ID: 292459 - Last Review: November 23, 2006 - Revision: 2.4

OL2002: How to Delete Items in a Collection

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SUMMARY

This article describes how to use the Outlook object model to delete items in a collection.

Microsoft provides programming examples for illustration only, without warranty either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose. This article assumes that you are familiar with the programming language being demonstrated and the tools used to create and debug procedures. Microsoft support professionals can help explain the functionality of a particular procedure, but they will not modify these examples to provide added functionality or construct procedures to meet your specific needs.
If you have limited programming experience, you may want to contact a Microsoft Certified Partner or Microsoft Advisory Services. For more information, visit these Microsoft Web sites:

Microsoft Certified Partners - https://partner.microsoft.com/global/30000104 (https://partner.microsoft.com/global/30000104)

Microsoft Advisory Services - http://support.microsoft.com/gp/advisoryservice (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/advisoryservice)

For more information about the support options that are available and about how to contact Microsoft, visit the following Microsoft Web site:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;CNTACTMS (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;cntactms) 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

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REFERENCES

For additional information about available resources and answersto commonly asked questions about Microsoft Outlook solutions, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

287530 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287530/EN-US/ ) OL2002: Questions About Custom Forms and Outlook Solutions

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