MVA Calendar Manager

Purpose

The MVA shared calendar contains all the courses you can take, and it is likely to be updated frequently without any sort of alert. You can use the script found here to extract selectively the Calendar events of the courses you wish to take, to delete the events relative to some courses, or to get a mail alert if a course was to be updated in the shared calendar.

Install

• Create a project in Google Apps Script (https://script.google.com/home/) and copy all the files under src (replace .js files by .gs files) files.

OR

• Copy paste the following command (Unix or Cygwin only, requires npm, not tested thoroughly though):

git clone https://github.com/aubin-tchoi/mva_calendar_manager &&
cd mva_calendar_manager && bash install.sh ||
echo "Please run install.sh manually (Unix-only, otherwise create the project as described above)" &&
open "https://script.google.com/home/"

How to use

• Update the config (see Parameters).
• Run any of the entry-point functions mentioned below using the online IDE (notice that you can choose the function to run).

On your first use you will have to grant the script authorizations to the services used.

You might have to add the shared calendar to get access to it from the script, look for the plus button in the bottom-right corner of the calendar window.

Entry points

• import_courses in import_courses.js: imports the calendar events relative to the courses tracked from the mva shared calendar.
• delete_courses in import_courses.js: deletes the calendar events relative to the courses tracked from your local calendar.
• report_course_movements in sync_changes.js: sends a mail if any of the events relative to a course tracked differs between the two calendars. You might want to bind this one to a daily trigger.
• count_incompatibilities in incompatibilities.js: logs all the overlaps between courses registered in array COURSES.

You might want to trigger function report_course_movements on a regular basis. To do so either add a trigger using the "Triggers" menu on the left bar of the Apps Script online IDE, or run function createWeeklyTrigger in sync_changes.js.

Parameters

You can find all the parameters in file constants.js.

• COURSES: list of the courses you wish to track.
• MVA_AGENDA_ID: the ID of the MVA shared calendar.
• MAIL_CONTENT: the header of the mail you will receive as an alert.
• MY_MAIL_ADDRESS: the mail address that will receive the alerts.

Implementation

The files are imported alphabetically, meaning that if there are 3 files names a.js, b.js and c.js, in file c you can access the content of any file, in file b only the content of files b and a and in file a only the content from within the file. This is actually while the file base_utils.js is not named utils.js.

You can use clasp to sync your local clone of the project with the Apps Script project: see https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/clasp

If you want to do everything in command line (run functions, get logs, add triggers) you can do so using clasp, however you need to link the project to a GCP and deal with API credentials.

• To link the project to a GCP, you can create one, copy its project number and paste it in the dedicated section of your Apps Script project's settings.
• To handle API credentials (required to use clasp run <function_name>) you will have to log in locally (copy your .clasprc.json) in the project folder and add the following urls to its scope variable: https://mail.google.com/ https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.scriptapp . Also add these urls to the manifest (appsscript.json) in the oauthScope array ( see: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/manifest and https://developers.google.com/apps-script/concepts/scopes) Then run clasp login --creds .clasprc.json (not 100% guaranteed that will directly work, there might be a few steps I forgot about).