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
.icsfile. - I did a few things to fix up the display of
DESCRIPTIONfields. First, I usedMIME::QuotedPrintto 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.