Using the WebDAV Protocol

Topic Last Modified: 2008-07-08

This section describes how to access Microsoft Exchange store content by using the WebDAV protocol.

Many of the examples in this section use an instance of the Microsoft.XMLHTTP Component Object Model (COM) class to send and receive WebDAV requests to the Exchange store. In addition, many examples use an instance of the Microsoft.XMLDOM COM component to construct and manipulate the XML bodies that are used for WebDAV protocol requests. The XMLHTTP COM object is part of the Microsoft XML (MSXML) 2.0 or later COM component and integrates directly with the other components. For example, you can retrieve the XML body of a successful PROPFIND Method directly from the XMLHTTP object as a DOMDocument object.

Use the XMLHTTP COM class only on clients. If you are creating applications on the server where the Exchange store is located, use the ServerXMLHTTP COM class or the Exchange OLE DB (ExOLEDB) provider.

When you manually construct the XML body of a WebDAV request, use caution with certain characters. Some special characters are reserved for use by XML and therefore they cannot be used directly in the XML text. The following table lists these characters and the character code that they must be substituted with.

For more information, see WebDAV Authentication and Security.