How to get truly free rooms from Exchange EWS

Question

and sorry for a poor title of the question

I´m trying to get all free rooms (not booked ones) from my exchange server. The thing is that I also get the rooms I have booked but nobody has accepted.

I would like to exclude them from the list after I book the room.

This is the code I use to book a room

ExchangeService service;
//...code to new-up and config service

var request = new Appointment(service)
{
  Subject = booking.Subject,
  Start = booking.Start,
  End = booking.End,
  Location = booking.Room
};

request.RequiredAttendees.Add(booking.Person);
request.RequiredAttendees.Add(booking.Room);

request.Save(SendInvitationsMode.SendOnlyToAll);

To note I have tried to call request.Accept() straight after Save() but without that "realy booking" the room. Pressing accept in Outlook is the only "fix". Needlessly to say I have tried everything I could find about this issue (I do not work with Exchange regularly).

And then the code to get free rooms

var rooms = service.GetRooms(locationAddress);

// all the meeting rooms at location
var rooms= rooms.Select(i => new AttendeeInfo { SmtpAddress = i.Address, AttendeeType = MeetingAttendeeType.Room });

// Get all availabilites from all rooms at given locations
var availability = service.GetUserAvailability(rooms, timeframe, AvailabilityData.FreeBusy);

foreach (var a in availability.AttendeesAvailability)
{
  // Here we always get all the free rooms
  // including the ones we booked earlier
  // UNTIL somebody clicks accept in Outlook and then it does not appear here!?
}

I can´t see that the rooms are marked differently before they are accepted in Outlook so I can´t differentiate between them and pull out them ones I don´t want.

I also really think that those rooms should not be available so there must bee some enum/tick/mark I can put on the room before booking it but I totally missing it.

Edit

I realy don't understand why there is no option for AvailabilityData.Free in the enum in the GetUserAvailability method (only FreeBusy, FreeBusyAndSuggestions and Suggestions but no Free only!?)

Answer 1

Ok this is rather silly... the code (I inherited) did not include code to actually remove rooms that where taken (busy). I only just noticed this...

The code to fix this is simply this one

  var busyRoomToRemove = a.CalendarEvents.ToList().Find(x => x.FreeBusyStatus == LegacyFreeBusyStatus.Busy);
  a.CalendarEvents.Remove(busyRoomToRemove); 

Sorry for the inconvenience :-)