Allow sync to single ics file (per calendar)

[slavkoja]

Please, add option to sync into one (single) ics file, which then can be used as foreign file for Orage (the XFCE's light calendar) - there is a lack of CalDAV clients in Linux, if one don't want to use Thunderbird or Evolution, then working with shared calendars can be problematic ;)

I think initialy about merging synced ics files into one and this seems to be trivial task, but split them back can be more trickly...

[untitaker]

Does orage use a single file as a storage format?

[untitaker]

It's rather unlikely that i will want to support this. The hack used for supporting single-file HTTP resources is awful enough.

[slavkoja]

Orage uses only one own calendar in one ics file, but it allows to add "remote" files (on local FS) and thus allows to use more calendars (and ics files as storage) at once. The remote files can be additionally marked as RO, but can be RW too. You can read more here http://www.kolumbus.fi/~w408237/orage/orage_doc_4_7.html#exchange-foreign-tab

IMO if you have one-file support, it can be simplest, in mean that there is not needing to start from scratch. I am not experienced Pythonist, but merging seems to be simple task - i did some initial playing with the icalendar module. There can be any VEVENT/VTODO/VJOURNAL simple added into one calendar object instead putting into separate file. If you have HTTP one file implemented, thus this must be the same, only by opposed direction.

The simplest way seems to be to store internally in vdir as usual and add some pre/posprocessing to achieve synchronization of the separate file as result and then reuse the most of existing code. But i cannot help, then it is your decision.

[untitaker]

The icalendar module is not as useful as it might seem, as simply extracting events, tasks and journal components is not enough -- timezones that appear outside of them have to be copied into each of them. Furthermore, starting to depend on icalendar would only solve the calendar stuff, addressbooks are obviously not parsable with icalendar, which means that we still have to maintain the custom hack.

I don't have a personal motivation to implement this, but everybody is welcome to try it themselves. A proper implementation would have its own module in vdirsyncer.storage, subclass vdirsyncer.storage.base.Storage and use split_collection to load the file and yet another hack to save the file back. I'd be delighted if somebody finds a way of not loading the whole file into memory, but i don't think anybody cares to try that hard.

[untitaker]

This is actually a lot easier than i thought since one can use icalendar.cal.Component to parse anything vobject-like, even if it's a vcf.

[untitaker]

Btw you could use radicale additionally to vdirsyncer for now. It is a caldav server which stores its stuff in a single ics file.

[slavkoja]

For now i have my own radicale on my own server, with ssh access, then i use rsync to sync from server to local machine (only one way) and this synced .ics as RO remote file in Orage. Do you mean to use two radicale servers with vdirsyncer between them?

[untitaker]

I wasn't aware that you already use radicale on the server side. In that case your approach works fine. You might want to check out Unison, which is like rsync but syncs in both directions. However, it can't handle the case where the file changes on both sides -- which is why a local radicale installation might still be helpful to let vdirsyncer figure out the conflict resolution. But for now i'd just swap rsync for unison, i am going to try to implement your feature request in the near future i think.

[slavkoja]

Thanks for willingness to implement this – that will be one small step for man; but one giant leap for XFCE's mankind :-)

I will learn more about unison and try differences, thanks to point to it

[untitaker]

Can you try the singlefilestorage branch?

pip install --user --upgrade --force-reinstall git://github.com/untitaker/vdirsyncer.git#singlefilestorage

Or

git clone git://github.com/untitaker/vdirsyncer.git
git checkout singlefilestorage
pip install --user --upgrade --force-reinstall .

[untitaker]

Eh, i should actually make this usable from the CLI...

[untitaker]

Okay, now. Usage:

[storage foo]
path = ~/path/to/file.ics

[slavkoja]

OK, tested it and it seems as working. I was success to modify the (one) VTODO and then sync it back to the server. I encouter one small error while testing (and trying), i can post more detailed report about configuration - there are more changes required in storage configuration (i did by try and fail).

I have only one suggestion now – it seems, that while syncing back to the server there was synced all calendar components, not only the one which was changed – is it intended behavior? The "LAST-MODIFIED" property was changed only in one item (as expected), but for any item there was a line:

Copying (updating) item 86359880-7eb1-4d71-a2fd-8c2de5bf9a4d to <CaldavStorage(**{'username': 'xxx', 'url': 'https://calend.slavino.sk/xxx/hlavny.ics/