CODEWITHSUNDEEP
icalendaralarm
Novarg
Novarg

Reputation: 7440

ics alarm not alarming

I'm trying to implement alarms(VALARM) in an .ics file. The idea is that whenever a specified record is created in a system, an automatic email with an invite is sent. The event works fine, it is being sent and I'm able to add it to calendar(both Google Calendar and iPhone/Mac calendar).

The problem that I'm facing now is that I can't add an alarm to it. I've seen this question and also tried parsing my .ics file on the link, provided in the answer, but no errors were found. One of the comments also states the following:

Both Outlook 2013 and Google seem to ignore VALARM regardless of EOL

But this has been posted in May 2014(almost 3 years ago). I can not believe that this is still the case.

I also went through this documentation and did not find any problems with my .ics file.

So the question is: do Google and Apple ignore these VALARM components or am I doing something wrong?

And do I understand correctly that this alarm with action DISPLAY should just show me a pop-up in the browser(google calendar) and calendar app?

Body of my file:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20170419T091500Z
DTEND:20170419T102500Z
DTSTAMP:20170418T091329Z
ORGANIZER;CN=Me Myself and I:MAILTO:[email protected]
UID:00U5E000001JfN7UAK
ATTENDEE;CUTYPE=INDIVIDUAL;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=
 TRUE;X-NUM-GUESTS=0:mailto:[email protected]
DESCRIPTION:some HTML in here
LOCATION:here
SEQUENCE:3
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:test reminder2
TRANSP:OPAQUE
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:testing reminders n stuff
TRIGGER;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20170418T110500Z
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

For info:

EDIT

Tried this also in my hotmail account, no reminder either

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4632

Answers (2)

Novarg
Novarg

Reputation: 7440

Okay, so I found my problem with Outlook.

According to MSDN Outlook documentation of triggers:

On import, Outlook ignores TRIGGER properties of type DATE-TIME.

So I changed the TRIGGER from DATE-TIME to -PT and it seems to work now.

Edited part of VALARM component:

BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT30M
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:Alarm test
END:VALARM

Upvotes: 2

Arnaud Quillaud
Arnaud Quillaud

Reputation: 4635

Gave an answer here: Sent email with iCal to outlook with valarm reminder

Most calendar clients will ignore any alarm that is sent along with an invitation. When you think about it, this makes sense: if you invite me, I may want to accept or decline, but you should not dictate when I want to be notified. On the other hand, when importing, you are making those events your own.

Upvotes: 3

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