How to access MailItems within the Message View?

Question

I'm working on an Outlook 2013 plugin that needs to access the emails currently displayed in the Message View.
I already searched around a lot but I could only find ways to list emails by folder (and also the current folder). E.g.
Outlook.MAPIFolder curFolder = this.Application.ActiveExplorer().CurrentFolder;
Outlook.Items mailItems = curFolder.Items;
MailItem item = mailItems.GetFirst();
This would work fine if the user didn't apply any search filters; but if a filter is applied via the instant search bar this code would produce the same list of MailItems as if the filter wasn't applied.
I thought of two ways of potentially solving this but couldn't find any resources online that worked for either. 1) Preferably, get direct read access to the MailItem list currently rendered within the Message View. 2) Alternatively, read the value in the instant
search text-box and apply that to the currently selected folder using the Items.Find()
command.
From what I've read I don't think either of these elements have supported direct access in the Outlook Object Model; but there must be some way to solve this problem. I've also tried using
this.Application.ActiveExplorer().Filter;
but this appears to output a DASL query in the format ("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062008-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/85700003" = 0) so I'm unsure if this is could be reformatted or be used as a filter.
Any guidance or explanations would be greatly appreciated; thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hello Davon,
The Filter property is useless in that case. I spent some time researching that and found the following way:
The
GetTable method of the TableView class returns a Table object
that represents all of the Microsoft Outlook items that are contained in a TableView object.
Here is what MSDN states:
The GetTable method of the TableView object
returns a table of items from one or more folders in the same store or spanning over multiple stores, in an aggregated view. For example, an aggregated view obtained by a search across all mail items by using Instant Search. This behavior differs from the GetTable method
of the Folder object,
which obtains a table object that contains items from the same folder.
private void DemoViewGetTable()
// Obtain the Inbox folder.
Outlook.Folder inbox =
Application.Session.GetDefaultFolder(
Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox)
as Outlook.Folder;
// Set ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder to Inbox.
// Inbox must be the current folder
// for TableView.GetTable to work correctly.
Application.ActiveExplorer().CurrentFolder = inbox;
// Ensure that the current view is a table view.
if (inbox.CurrentView.ViewType ==
Outlook.OlViewType.olTableView)
Outlook.TableView view =
inbox.CurrentView as Outlook.TableView;
// No arguments are needed for View.GetTable.
Outlook.Table table = view.GetTable();
Debug.WriteLine("View Count="
+ table.GetRowCount().ToString());
while (!table.EndOfTable)
// First row in Table.
Outlook.Row nextRow = table.GetNextRow();
Debug.WriteLine(nextRow["Subject"]
+ " Modified: "
+ nextRow["LastModificationTime"]);