Well, I found the first problem with my exported iCalendar data. In iCal, I turned off everything except my two exported Oracle Calendar views (one done via export/import, the other extracted and published), so I could compare the two. I noticed that my published calendar was not showing recurring events properly. Only one instance of each event was showing up.

Now, I already knew that the CAPI is supposed to export multiple VEVENT records for recurring events, instead of adding RRULE attributes. But I didn’t expect this to be a problem, as I just need the stuff to show up, and I’m not worried about editing the exported data, adding new recurrences, etc. I’m doing all that kind of manipulation via the Oracle Calendar client.

So, why am I only seeing one event? First thing I checked was the .ics file. Maybe the docs are wrong, and it’s exporting RRULEs after all, and I’m ignoring them? Nope… each recurrence does have a separate VEVENT in the iCalendar file. So why aren’t they all showing up? Because they all have the same UID.

So, CAPI does export separate VEVENTs, but it doesn’t make each one a “real” separate event by assigning it a new UID. Kind of annoying. It’s one thing to cheap out and not support RRULE, but it’s entirely another thing when the result doesn’t comply with the iCalendar spec.

Interestingly, the vCalendar export does assign unique IDs to the recurrences. Too bad they couldn’t do it with the iCalendar export. Looks like I’m going to have to do it myself. For my first stab, I’ll just build a hash of UIDs as I’m reading the iCalendar file, and if I find a duplicate, I’ll append an ascending number to the end. Hopefully that’ll work OK. It’s dependent on Oracle Calendar exporting its data in the same order each time. Dunno if it does or not. If not, it means that the recurring events’ UIDs may not be consistent across multiple exports. That may or may not present a problem with the Palm export. I guess time will tell.

Well, off I go to make this happen.

Today I began work on a Perl script to massage the exported Oracle Calendar data before publishing. I exported a full 3-year date range (the same date range I’m currently loading into iCal via export/import), and began addressing some of the issues I noted in my previous post.

• Times showing up incorrectly in PHP iCalendar: This was just a config thing. I hadn’t configured PHP iCalendar with my time zone, so it was defaulting to UTC. The iCal-exported stuff was showing up correctly because Apple adds explicit time zone info to the .ics file.
• I did a few things to fix up the display of DESCRIPTION fields. First, I used MIME::QuotedPrint to strip out some of the ‘=20’s and other MIME artifacts that were lying around. Then, I stripped blank lines out to keep entries from getting truncated. I was originally un-escaping commas (by stripping out leading backslashes), but apparently they need to be escaped to comply with the iCalendar specification. iCal displays the commas correctly (without backslashes), but PHP iCalendar leaves the backslashes in.
• I added an Apple-specific field, X-WR-CALNAME. iCal uses this as the default calendar name to use when importing or subscribing to the file. Not totally necessary, but saves typing.

With those changes, everything shows up nicely now and the descriptions look good. The end product is a usable .ics file that I can subscribe to with iCal, and it includes everything I want except alarm and attendee data. I’ll tackle alarms first.

Alarms: The vCalendar export includes alarm data. The strange thing is, I have no idea where the alarms in the vCalendar file are coming from. I’ve never defined any alarms within Oracle Calendar, yet somehow they’re showing up in the vCalendar export file. Certain events will show up with alarms in the vCalendar file, but when I go into Oracle Calendar and bring up that event, it will say there is no alarm defined. I almost wonder if the vCalendar export process is picking up other peoples’ alarms or something. Very strange.

Looks like the iCalendar export gets this right. I went into Oracle Calendar and defined an alarm (Oracle Calendar actually calls them reminders), then re-exported the data in iCalendar format, and I got a VALARM section added to that event. I’ll have to see if it shows up properly in iCal. I’d like to be able to set alarms and have them show up on my Palm, as I’m prone to get sidetracked and forget meetings otherwise.

OK, looks like iCal picks up the VALARMs properly. Just remains to be seen how they’ll show up on the Palm. It looks like I can set different alarm types (message, email, audio etc.) using the ACTION attribute. As exported, they show up as ACTION:DISPLAY which gets translated to ‘Message’ in iCal. At some point I’ll have to see how different actions will affect behavior on iCal and the Palm. Then if necessary, I can tweak the ACTION attribute with my Perl script.

With that, I think this gives me all the functionality I was getting with the export/import process, so there’s no reason I can’t make this my “official” method now, and sync this data to my Palm. If that works OK, I’ll work on automating it and bringing in attendee data.