Event Organiser ICAL Sync questions

[John]

Hi Stephen,

I’ve got a client asking about syncing their iCloud calendar with their website, which is using EO for calendar and events. I didn’t think this would be possible but then I just noticed the iCal Sync extension.
1. Does this extension only work with Google, or will it work with iCloud also?
2. When EO syncs with the ICAL feed does it create new events on the website, or is there something else happening there?
3. Are you still able to add, edit, delete other events as usual? If so, do they play well with the imported events?
4. Anything else you can tell me about how this integrates with EO?

Thanks,
John

[Stephen Harris]

Hi John,

1. It’ll work with any application producing a valid iCal feed (including other sites running EO, if the feed is enabled)
2. Yes it creates new events on the site, unless that event already exists (this is determined by a UID, part of the iCal feed specification).
3. You can edit events, but some changes may be overwritten when you the feed is next fetched. That includes any data which is contained in an iCal feed. It doesn’t, for example, including bookings data or meta data

This is not a two-way sync as not all other applications support this (or do so in diferrent ways).

[John Sundberg]

Thanks, I bought the ICAL add-on this morning before I saw your reply.

Now that I’ve tried it I have a few more questions. I haven’t been able to get it to work with iCloud, but it is sort-of working with Google Calendar.

1. In GC I created two recurring events. When I synced with EO the events showed up on the first day of their occurring, but no further recurrences appeared. I double-checked in GC and they’re definitely showing up every week. Is there something I’m missing there that could make that work?

2. I used two different locations (venues) for those two events. One matched a venue that already exists in EO, and that venue showed up in that event post. The other location did not create a new venue, so I’m guessing that syncing does not create a venue but only matches with existing venues in EO?

3. Is there any way to have a synced event show up in or be assigned to an EO category?

[John Sundberg]

Follow-up on the recurring events not showing up:

I’ve just learned that you need to give it an end date. If you leave it as “Never” then EO doesn’t recognize that it’s a recurring event. With an end date they show up as expected.

[John Sundberg]

Follow-up to my venue observation/question:

It looks like it does create a venue when the import happens if the venue isn’t already there, but it doesn’t add the address information.

Adding an address to the “Where” description in GC creates a venue with that address as part of the name of the venue, which isn’t desirable, so will need to let my clients know about that one.

[Stephen Harris]

Hi John,

Yes, you’re right. It doesn’t add the address details to the venue, because these details aren’t given in the iCal feed (or at least, there is no standard way of presenting venue location details, and so it can’t be parsed into the street/city/postcode fields). The iCal specification (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt) says that the LOCATION tag should have value type TEXT, but gives no further details, so the venue details could be presented.

There is a GEO tag which isn’t currently supported (and be used to determine address details). I’ll look into this, but the GEO tag isn’t included in Event Organiser produced iCal feeds because Google Calendar didn’t seem to like them. I’ll definitely revisit this though.

Regarding (1), what was the recurrence rule for the events? Event Organiser, for technical reasons cannot support indefinitely recurring events. However, in the next release of Event Organiser, the plug-in shall set imported & indefinitely recurring events to recur until 2038. (This is something that needs to be addressed in the standard Event Organiser plug-in and not the iCal extension).

Regarding (3), you can in the 1.1 update (due this week).

[John Sundberg]

Hi Stephen,

I’ve downloaded and installed the 1.1 update for ICAL Sync, and I see that there is now a setting to assign events to a category, with the first option being “Use category specified in feed.”

My questions:

1. Where is category specified in a feed? I’ve looked in both iCloud and Google Calendar but I don’t see anything about a category in event settings in either of those two apps.

2. Is a feed somehow limited to only one category for the entire feed?

Thanks in advance,
John

[Stephen Harris]

iCal feeds can specify categories on an event-by-event basis. The option allows you to either specify the category the importing events are assigned to, or to simply import the events to the category designed by the iCal CATEGORIES tag (if present).

If you wish to import a feed into a particular category, then yes, you can only select on category. The CATEGORIES tag supports multiple categories however, and if assigning events to the categories designated by that, then it will add events to multiple categories.

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