It appears that Oracle has totally dropped support for legacy CorporateTime servers in its recent SDK releases. I found some API documentation for the old CAPI_ functions, and as I mentioned before, some of them do appear to show up in the shared libraries. However, try as I might, I couldn’t reference any of the functions using the 10.1.1 libraries. The fact that none of them are prototyped in ctapi.h is also kind of telling. Looks like I won’t be getting any joy out of the 10.1.1 SDK. Could it be that Oracle dropped support so that more people would buy their new, expensive Collaboration Suite? Naaaah.

However, I won’t give up that easily. I have Google. I plugged CAPI_Connect into Google, sifted through a few pages of results, and lo and behold, I found a site that had the entire 2.0 CorporateTime SDK, circa 2002, for Linux/i686!!! After glancing over my shoulder to make sure Oracle’s lawyers weren’t looking, I grabbed it.

The SDK includes some example code, calendar.c, which connects to the server and allows interaction through a text-driven menu system. It built painlessly using the supplied Makefile. The next challenge was figuring out how to use it to log in. To make a long story short:

1. First prompt: Hit return (no config file)
2. Second prompt (name of calendar server): Enter calendar.umbc.edu:5730
3. Third prompt (ACE mechanism): Enter 2. It seems to work fine without specifying an ACE mechanism.
4. Fourth prompt (user or Sysop): Enter 1 to authenticate as a user.
5. Fifth prompt (username): This was the tricky part to figure out. Enter ?/S=lastname/G=firstname/. In my case I used ?/S=riddle/G=paul/. Obviously patterned after the LDAP attributes, surname and givenName.
6. Sixth prompt: Enter password.

Once I figured out the proper incantations, it logged me into the calendar server! I tried out a few menu options. Data seems to come through in iCalendar format, which is what I want.

This is great, it looks like I’ll be able to automate the export/massage/publish process as I had originally hoped.

More later…

Well, my initial efforts to use the Oracle Calendar SDK have been a resounding failure. I got everything installed, and was able to compile a “hello world” type program. However it appears that our calendar server is too old and crusty to work with the newer set of API functions, all of which have the prefix CSDK_. Apparently I need to use the old CorporateTime API, with functions that begin with CAPI_. Now, when I run nm * in the SDK library directory, it turns up a bunch of these functions, but I’m not sure they’re actually what I want, and I don’t have any documentation or sample code. I’ll search around, and give this one more shot, but I’m beginning to resign myself to the fact that this is going to have to be a partially-manual process, at least until we upgrade our calendar server.

On the same front, I started looking at what it would take to create my own .ics file which I could subscribe to with iCal. I started by creating a dummy calendar in iCal, publishing it, copying the published .ics file into /tmp on my linux box, and then unpublishing the file in iCal (which deletes it off the WebDAV server). I then edited the .ics file in /tmp, changed the name, copied it file back to the web server, and successfully subscribed to it with iCal. Apple sticks a GUID field, among other things, into its published .ics files, and I’m not sure how I’d generate one from scratch, so I’ll just use this file as a template and I’ll be able to build a .ics file that iCal will be happy with. So, making progress here.