Can ical.js watch a calendar for changes and emit, e.g. via hook.io?

[mrjcleaver]

I use a time tracking program that writes calendar events as I track time.

It would be useful if I could watch that calendar from node, and everytime an ical entry was made, trigger a sequence of other processing.

So I'm looking for some sort of callback on changes.

I'm using hook.io for another part of the project, so that would be a handy coincidence for me.

Thanks, M.

[peterbraden]

Hi,

This is actually a fairly difficult problem - most ical emitters don't correctly implement the spec (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445#section-4.8.7 for change management) - so we'd have to create some heuristic to see how to check whether events had been updated.

I'd love to have this in the library - if you end up working on this problem then do let me know, perhaps we can collaborate and get this in the library.

[mrjcleaver]

Aha, okay, good context. Thanks for the answer!

Given the difficulty, I'm more likely to make something comparably half-assed for my edge case (coming from the Mac's iCalendar), or to even circumvent the problem completely (in 3 years my calendar actually has totalled only 900 entries in it) - I could emit everything, and record what I've seen, and filter out anything I've seen before.

Best, Martin.

[peterbraden]

yeah, it's fairly easy to just iterate through entries if your dataset is gonna be small - keep in mind that entries may be updated as well as just created, that's why it's not as simple as keeping a set of event id's. If you are fairly confident that this edge case isn't applicable then it's fairly easy.

[mrjcleaver]

Fair point about records changing. As my data comes from a timesheet app, in general only the current period entry could be mutating.

That said, I might as well record the record as I last saw it... ;)

Best, M.