Custom Icons and Table View

A couple of customers recently reported this interesting issue with Outlook views and custom form icons:

1. Publish a custom form in Outlook and chosen to give it an icon. There doesn’t need to be anything special about the form. In fact, the default custom form icon will reproduce this issue.
2. Configure a folder with the Table view (single line, with rows and columns). One way to do this is to turn off the Reading pane and make the view wide enough that Outlook defaults to the Table.
3. Create a new item using your form.

Expected: The entry in the table uses the custom icon.

Actual: The entry in the table has no icon.

Further, if you narrow the view so that it switches to two line mode, you’ll see the icon appear, and it will continue to be used even if you switch back to the Table view.

The problem stems from the logic we use to determine when we can go back to the forms manager to get the icon. We don’t want to hit the forms manager while we’re rendering the view since this could cause a network call which would slow everything down. So we decide we’ll go get the icon later. Except later never happens for this view. The other views don’t have this flaw – only the Table view. We’re working on a fix for this. I’ll post back here when the fix is ready.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 13, 2014
  Is this for Outlook 2013 only, or older versions as well? Thank you Steve for sharing this information publicly, much appreciated. -- SvenC

• Anonymous
  January 13, 2014
  2013 only - I had that in the writeup, but lost it in editing.

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2014
  Hi Steve, do you have any news about a fix for that icon issue?

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2014
  This is now fixed: support.microsoft.com/.../2878323