add-to-calendar

Prototype of hub event add-to-calendar component

NOTES:

OSX Calendar App and recent versions of Outlook both support iCalendar. We can support this with a data uri. However, see notes under iCalendar below.

Google calendar is just a url.

Thus we can do all of this on the client side.

My testing indicates that we are already doing what is necessary in order for timezones to work. But if we run into problems, the iCalendar spec provides for more complex timezone specification.

Google calendar

Wow there does not seem to be any official documentation. But I found this.

Notes:

• I set the event page url as the sprop queryparam. However, I don't see this surface in the ui so I also append it to the end of the description.

iCalendar

How seemless this is to the user is highly dependent on the user's configuration. In order for this to work seamlessly, the user must:

1. Have their browser configured to always open files of type .ics.
2. Have their preferred calendar application set to open .ics files.

iCalendar spec

iCalendar validator

Notes:

• PRODID is a required element of the VCALENDAR object. It is intended to uniquely identify the product that created the event. I recommend we use : +//arcgis.com//NONSGML ArcGIS Hub//EN
• UID is intended to uniquely identify the event. I think we can use pageId for this.
• URL will be the url of the event page. In this demo we do not have that but we can get it in the hub apps. I don't see this surface in outlook so for Outlook I append it to the end of the description.
• DTSTAMP will be updated date.
• GEO I believe i am setting this according to the spec but I don't see it in any of the calendars.
• LOCATION, CONFERENCE - I was never able to get outlook to respect CONFERENCE and icalendar seemed to respect it sometimes. Thus, if we have a location that is a url, we set it as LOCATION and CONFERENCE. If location is not a url we just set it on LOCATION.

Sample iCalendar files

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Apple Inc.//Mac OS X 10.13.1//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
BEGIN:VEVENT
CREATED:20170911T151430Z
UID:ECEA9F1C-C79F-4BB0-9D77-327C15731826
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20170208
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
SUMMARY:Mike Juniper  BDay
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20170207
DTSTAMP:20170911T150531Z
ORGANIZER;CN="DC_Dev Calendar":mailto:DC_Dev@esri.com
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

More

Other References

Webcal (we will not use this now but possibly down the road)