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:
- First prompt: Hit
return(no config file) - Second prompt (name of calendar server): Enter
calendar.umbc.edu:5730 - Third prompt (ACE mechanism): Enter
2. It seems to work fine without specifying an ACE mechanism. - Fourth prompt (user or Sysop): Enter
1to authenticate as a user. - 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. - 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…