EWS is an API that third-party programmers can use to communicate with Microsoft Exchange Server. The API exists since Exchange Server 2007 and is continuously up-dated by Microsoft and present in the latest iteration of the product, Exchange Server 2016.

This library provides a native and platform-independent way to use EWS in your C++ application.

• Visual Studio 2012
• Visual Studio 2013
• Visual Studio 2015
• Clang 3.5 with libc++
• GCC 4.8 with libstdc++

• Microsoft Windows 8.1 and Windows 10
• Mac OS X 10.10
• RHEL 7
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (x86_64 and i386)
• SLES12

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 SP1

However, our goal is to support all Exchange Server versions since 2007.

• libcurl, at least version 7.22

• Git
• CMake
• Doxygen (optional)

You can obtain an up-to-date and easy-to-use binary distribution of libcurl from here: confusedbycode.com/curl

Additionally, you probably need to tell CMake where to find it. Just set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to the path where you installed libcurl (e.g. C:\Program Files\cURL) and re-configure.

You can also use the script provided in scripts\build-curl.bat to compile libcurl for your particular version of Visual Studio.

ews-cpp's source code is available as a Git repository. To obtain it, type:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/otris/ews-cpp.git

The library is header-only. So there is no need to build anything. Just copy the include/ews/ directory wherever you may like.

To build the accompanied tests with debugging symbols and Address Sanitizer enabled do something like this:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DENABLE_ASAN=ON /path/to/source
make

Type make help to see more configuration options.

To build the tests and examples on Windows you can use cmake-gui. For more see: https://cmake.org/runningcmake/

If you do not want to use any GUI to compile the examples and tests you could do something like this with the Windows cmd.exe command prompt:

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\CMake\bin
mkdir build-dir
cd build-dir
cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" ^
    -DCURL_LIBRARY="C:\Program Files\cURL\7.49.1\win64-debug\lib\libcurl_debug.lib" ^
    -DCURL_INCLUDE_DIR="C:\Program Files\cURL\7.49.1\win64-debug\include" ^
    C:\path\to\source
cmake --build .

Make sure to choose the right generator for your environment.

Use the doc target to create the API documentation with Doxygen. Type:

make doc
open html/index.html

Export the following environment variables in order to run individual examples or the test suite:

EWS_TEST_DOMAIN
EWS_TEST_USERNAME
EWS_TEST_PASSWORD
EWS_TEST_URI

Once you've build the project, you can run the test suite with:

./tests

ews-cpp is written in a "modern C++" way:

• C++ Standard Library, augmented with rapidxml for XML parsing
• Smart pointers instead of raw pointers
• Pervasive RAII idiom
• Handle errors using C++ exceptions
• Coding conventions inspired by Boost

Just add:

#include <ews/ews.hpp>

to your include directives and you are good to go.

Take a look at the examples/ directory to get an idea of how the API feels. ews-cpp is a thin wrapper around Microsoft's EWS API. You will need to refer to the EWS reference for Exchange for all available parameters to pass and all available attributes on items. From 10.000ft it looks like this:

You have items and you have the service. You use the service whenever you want to talk to the Exchange server.

Please note one important caveat though. ews-cpp's API is designed to be "blocking". This means whenever you call one of the service's member functions to talk to an Exchange server that call blocks until it receives a request from the server. And that may, well, just take forever (actually until a timeout is reached). You need to keep this in mind in order to not block your main thread.

Implications of this design choice

Pros:

• A blocking API is much easier to use and understand

Cons:

• You just might accidentally block your UI thread
• You cannot issue thousands of EWS requests asynchronously simply because you cannot spawn thousands of threads in your process. You may need additional effort here

ews-cpp is developed by otris software AG and was initially released to the public in July 2016. It is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (see LICENSE file).

For more information about otris software AG visit our website otris.de or our Open Source repositories at github.com/otris.