Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Made a first stab at publishing exported output from Oracle Calendar tonight. I ran my CAPI program for a one-week time window, deleted the MIME headers at the beginning and end of the output, and slapped it up on my web server without any further mods. It actually sorta worked. Observations:

• The iCalendar data appears to come through in DOS format, although neither iCal nor PHP iCalendar seem to have problems reading it. So it appears there’s no immediate need to convert.
• PHP iCalendar shows the times incorrectly. The exported data has the time in GMT (or “Zulu” time). iCal correctly converts things to EST, but PHP iCalendar does not. I probably need to add timezone data to the file.
• One of my meetings has a long DESCRIPTION property. The text is kind of screwed up. There are a lot of backslashed characters, a few ‘=20’s thrown in, and most importantly, the exported data has an extra carriage return thrown in. Both apps truncate the description at this spot.
• Attendees are missing (which was expected) as well as alarms. Hopefully, getting alarms is just a matter of adding the appropriate alarm stuff to my list of properties to export. We’ll see.

So it’s obvious that I’ll need to write some Perl code to massage the exported data a bit, but I already expected that. The important thing is, we’re definitely making progress here.