When you view Web folders on Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or on a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Web site, you may notice that some applications may experience problems with refreshing if that application uses the Shell32 SHBrowseForFolder API with the BIF_BROWSEINCLUDEURLS flag. If a Web folder is changed by an external process, that change to the application may not be reflected in the SHBrowseForFolder dialog box. That change to the application cannot be updated unless the application is closed and then the application is reopened.

By using the BIF_BROWSEINCLUDEURLS flag in the BROWSEINFO structure, the SHBrowseForFolder dialog box can be used to view Web folder locations. The SHBrowseForFolder dialog box does this by using the Microsoft Office Shell Namespace Extension (MSONSEXT) and then enumerates the shell folder items that the SHBrowseForFolder dialog box returns for a particular Web folder. MSONSEXT relies on other components to obtain this information from the server. MSONSEXT relies on Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Internet Publishing (MSDAIPP) and on Microsoft FrontPage Web Extender Client (WEC).

By default, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, SharePoint Server 2007, and Windows SharePoint Services use FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions from Microsoft for authoring Web folders. When a client connection is made to a FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions-controlled share, the client typically caches the Web site information for the WEC session. Additionally, the client synchronizes with the server when the client is explicitly told to do this. This behavior differs from SharePoint Portal Server 2001 that is based on Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV). SharePoint Portal Server 2001 does not cache the data on the client. The new behavior increases overall performance. But the new behavior does disconnect the client view from whatever changes are being made on the server. If you change the folder structure by some external means, those changes do not appear in the host application unless the session is restarted or unless WEC is instructed to update the cache.

The MSONSEXT extension can instruct WEC to update the cache if you press F5. However, the SHBrowseForFolder dialog box does not use the IShellView interface that is provided by the MSONSEXT extension. Therefore, you cannot press F5 from the ShBrowseForFolder dialog box to update the cache.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

For more information about the WEC cache, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: