Find Currently Viewed page, section and notebook

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It has been awhile since I have posted anything about the OneNote API and I apologize/apologise for that; we are busy planning the next release of OneNote. In fact if I haven't mentioned it before the codename is Office14, the code names are always based on the version number of Office. So while we have a bunch of great ideas of for the next release of OneNote we are always listening for suggestions and comments. If you have thoughts please email me or use our Connect site.

That being said I wanted to answer a question that came my way a few days ago from Michael @ Mindjet (see his addin here). He wanted to know this:

How do I determine the section that is currently visible to the user.

Well here is a quick method to help you with that:

        private
string findCurrentlyViewedPage()

        {

            string
strXML;

            string
strNamespace = "https://schemas.microsoft.com/office/onenote/2007/onenote";

            // Load
the xml into a document

            XmlDocument
xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();

            // Get
the hierarchy from the root to pages

            onApp.GetHierarchy(null, OneNote.HierarchyScope.hsPages,
out strXML);

            // Load
the xml into a document

            xmlDoc.LoadXml(strXML);

            //Create
an XmlNamespaceManager for resolving namespaces.

            XmlNamespaceManager
nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);

            nsmgr.AddNamespace("one", strNamespace);

            // Find
the page ID of the active page

            XmlElement
xmlActivePage = (XmlElement)xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("//one:Page[@isCurrentlyViewed=\"true\"]",
nsmgr);

            string
strActivePageID = xmlActivePage.GetAttribute("ID");

            return
strActivePageID;

        }

So I bet if you wanted to do the same thing for the sections you could just change the SelectSingleNode XPath query from one:Page to one:Section and it will work. Actually this is correct! And you can change your query to only be for hsSections as well.

        private
string findCurrentlyViewedSection()

        {

            string
strXML;

            string
strNamespace = "https://schemas.microsoft.com/office/onenote/2007/onenote";

            // Load
the xml into a document

            XmlDocument
xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();

            // Get
the hierarchy from the root to pages

            onApp.GetHierarchy(null, OneNote.HierarchyScope.hsSections,
out strXML);

            // Load
the xml into a document

            xmlDoc.LoadXml(strXML);

            //Create
an XmlNamespaceManager for resolving namespaces.

            XmlNamespaceManager
nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);

            nsmgr.AddNamespace("one", strNamespace);

            // Find
the page ID of the active page

            XmlElement
xmlActivePage = (XmlElement)xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("//one:Section[@isCurrentlyViewed=\"true\"]",
nsmgr);

            string
strActivePageID = xmlActivePage.GetAttribute("ID");

            return
strActivePageID;

        }

And finally for the currently viewed notebook:

        private
string findCurrentlyViewedNotebook()

        {

            string
strXML;

            string
strNamespace = "https://schemas.microsoft.com/office/onenote/2007/onenote";

            // Load
the xml into a document

            XmlDocument
xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();

            // Get
the hierarchy from the root to pages

            onApp.GetHierarchy(null, OneNote.HierarchyScope.hsNotebooks,
out strXML);

            // Load
the xml into a document

            xmlDoc.LoadXml(strXML);

            //Create
an XmlNamespaceManager for resolving namespaces.

            XmlNamespaceManager
nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);

            nsmgr.AddNamespace("one", strNamespace);

            // Find
the page ID of the active page

            XmlElement
xmlActivePage = (XmlElement)xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("//one:Notebook[@isCurrentlyViewed=\"true\"]",
nsmgr);

            string
strActivePageID = xmlActivePage.GetAttribute("ID");

            return
strActivePageID;

        }

So this is just something that Michael asked me and I wanted to share with all of you.