CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp-classiccalendaricalendar
Kristen
Kristen

Reputation: 4301

Publishing a Calendar

I have a webapp (Classic ASP) that manages a calendar of events for schools. Events are either general (applicable to all), or specific to certain pupils (e.g. a sports match that a child is taking part in).

I would like to "publish" the calendar so that Parents can have the events on their iPhone or whatever. A bonus would be if I could highlight the events that appertain to their children (this currently happens on the website when the parent logs in), but that's not essential.

Crucial is that if the underlying event changes (date/time change, or cancellation) that the Parent's calendar also updates to reflect this (rather than creating a duplicate entry with the revised information).

I've had a quick look at iCal and I presume that I could publish in that format (including revised entries and deletions), but there is talk of needing .Mac or WebDAV and I'm not sure of the logistics of that.

So I'm after advice on a suitable mechanism for getting the calendar data onto people's iPhones and Outlooks etc, and keeping it up to date, and any technical tutorials that you would recommend.

Many thanks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1146

Answers (1)

anmari
anmari

Reputation: 4173

Publishing a .ics file is what you need. The link to the file becomes your 'subscribe' link. People can then subscribe with any application that accepts .ics files (which is pretty much any calendar application these days).

cancellations and updates:

The subscribing application and the subscribing individual's settings will determine the frequency of checking for updates (not much one can do about that).

So for cancellations and updates one should probably also have some other method of altering people to the fact (email, sms, tweet etc) that an event has been cancelled or deleted as they may notice that it has changed in their calendar app.

highlighting

There is a CATEGORY field in the ics spec that you could maybe set to a parent .... BUT... I don't think you can control the 'highlighting' on the subscribing application.

What you could do is offer multiple feeds/files per classification/ parent, so they subscribe to their 'own' feeds, if that makes sense.

EG: In my wordpress plugin, it allows various wordpress classifications (eg: tags, categories, authors) to be used to offer ics feeds that are subsets of the main feeds so people can subscribe to event sets that are of interest to them.

Testing it out

one can test the concept out using a test google calendar to produce the ics feed and your own smartphone, outlook, etc calendar application. Google is also using for testing your ics file when you have one as it is fairly pedantic about the format. (eg: import or subscribe to your produced ics file from google calendar).

PS. I have a list of other ics spec and ics testing resources on the bottom right of icalevents.com homepage.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions