Deeplink iOS Calendar

Question

Trying to share a calendar event over SMS. The text contains the datetime of the event, which iOS picks up as a link, which opens iCal (Create Event, Create Reminder, Show in Calendar, Copy Event).

When a user taps "Create Event" - it just creates an empty cal event for the datetime. Is there a way to auto-fill the event with details when the users taps "Create Event"? Perhaps through deeplinking a URL or similar?

Answer 1

The behaviour you describe is iphone ios doing some natural language processing and recognising that 'hey that looks like a date or time and location'. When you click on the text, it will offer to create the event but one still has to fill in the rest of the details. It is not yet clever enough to work out the Event subject, and may not be that good at it if it tried.

There is a term 'Rich Media Messaging'(RMM) which aims to get past the limitations of the basic sms (short message system). This is hard if one is looking for universal phone and phone provider support as not all phones do multi media messaging. RMM appears to basically be a combination of multi media messages and short links. So basically there is no 'markup' for simple text messaging.

The only reliable universally acceptable way to 'text' an event via sms, an event with full details that would be recognised by all smart phones is via a link to an ics file. As the standard SMS length is only 160 characters and most hyperlinks are pretty long (usually between 40 to 100 characters), they can eat up necessary space in your message. Unicode characters could use that up quicker, so a user friendly short link might be best.

The ics file has all the info to pass to the system:

1. the text/calendar mime type tells the system it's got events inside so pass the file to the calendar app
2. then the contents of the ics file inform the calendar app of all the bits of the event as per the RFC5545.

For demonstration, I texted the "5 May yoga" single event link from this page https://test.icalevents.com/agenda/ to a phone. That ics file only contains a single event.

When one clicks on the link in the text message, the smartphone does as described above and suggests to create an event. This method has the benefit that one could perhaps track the clicks to the short link.