- Author:
- JVL
- Date:
- 20060427
- Version:
- 0.9.37
- Todo:
- edit and update the IcalSrv client information document. Especially with info on the two use case scenarios.
On this page you will find some first reports on the use of Egroupware and IcalSrv with specific clients.
Whether some feature, like e.g. importing recurrent events from a specific client into Egroupware is supported or not, can in principle depend on three things: 1) does the client allow setting this, 2) does egroupware provide a method for setting and using this and finally 3) is the IcalSrv service capable of converting this specific info from the client to egw and possibly vice versa?
In Egroupware I filled a week calendar with
- E1) a recurring dinner event, every two days,
- E2) a meeting appointment on monday morning
- E3) a free day on thursday
The egw calendar filled in weekview
And in Egroupware Infolog I added a Task and a subtask
- T1 Write a XYZ report and as subtask
- T2 write chapter 10 of the report
This shows up in egroupware as in the picture below:
The egw infolog list view with 2 tasks
Korganizer is the KDE agenda and todo client. I used the 3.5.0 version for most of the testing (so it should work well ;-) )
To access the IcalSrv for Egroupware calendar and tasks, you have to add a socalled kresource to the resources. You can do this either via a wizzard or by doing an Add(resource) in the left-under pane.
The resource must be of the type remote iCalendar and for reading and writing the same URL should be used. When done so, both events and tasks will get imported and exported from Korganizer via the same kresource.
To authenticate to the IcalSrv from within korganizer. you can just set the Download From and Upload To fields of the created kresource to one and the same URL as something like: http://myserver.myorg.org/egroupware/icalsrv.php
Later on, when you do a reload or a save, a popup window will appear that ask you for authentication info. Fill this in and set "remember info on local computer" or so and your done.
Can be configured as automatic, time triggered or manual.
.....TBW....... Below an excerpt from a posting of mine:
- Nevertheless, if you want to use this for synchronisation --at least from KO to EGW-- your mentioned problems stay It can be done by saving your remote EGW calendar resource in KO to local calendar (called export in KO). Going offline and maybe editing the local KO calendar. And later when online again importing this local calendar again in the remote EGW calendar resource and the publishing it to EGW. Maybe not the easiest of things, but it works!
However for using it as a handy and fast remote (semi online) interface for EGW, as alternative to the webbrowser, icalsrv works great. IMHO...
Korganizer connected via IcalSrv to our example account in Egroupware show us the view below:
Korganizer weekview via the remote icalsrv connected to egroupware.
Notice that:
- the Todos are neatly shown in their hierarchy and with their percentages completed
- the due date of the Todo is shown in the All Day screen
- the whole day event on thursday is correctly shown in the All Day screen.
- Korganizer can get its caches confused.
- Korganizer in default setting does a automatic publish immediately after each change of an event or todo. This can be costly.
....TBW...
Sunbird is the standalone calendar application from the Mozilla project.
.....TBW....
......
....TBW........
............
On connecting Sunbird to our egw account via icalsrv, this gives us the view below:
Sunbird weekview via the remote icalsrv connected to egroupware.
Notice that:
- the task hierarchy display (task and subtasks) and the percent complete is not shown in Sunbird. Merely a list of the induvidual tasks. It can though be completely configured to have these and other fields of the tasks shown in the task overview pane.
- the all day event on thursday is present, but due to some bug, it is a bit small displayed..
- In version 0.2+ under Linux I could not publish recurrent events! It seemed that these also were not exported correctly to a localfile. Seems like a sunbird bug.
- In version 0.2+ under Linux I could not add new tasks in a subcribed calendar. Dont know what is wrong here..
Evolution provides in its 2.x versions utilities to handle calendars and tasks. For some strange reason it seems that in the versions that I tried (v2. ??) only reading from remote iCalendars is implemented!
For implementing writing via iCalendar there even seems to be a pending bounty available... (status: end 2005) Strange if you know that evo does have a more or less working caldav-plugin..
Both Calendars and Tasks can be read using, what Evolution calls the webcal protocol. To setup a remote calendar do the following:
- in calendar pane, on the right mouse button menu select New Calendar
- chose a Type: On the web and give a name etc. This should now build a new calendar in entry in the calendar pane, under the "On The Web" folder.
- with the right mouse select its menu and select properties. In here you can set the name, color, URL and refresh timings.
You can authenticate to the IcalSrv from within evolution by setting in the properties field of a (remote) calendar the URL as something like: webcal://username:passwd@myserver.myorg.org/egroupware/icalsrv.php
I didnot find any other method.
Setting up task access via IcalSrv is quite analoguous to the "On the web" calendar setup:
Go to the Tasks pane, select new tasklist, select "On the Web". Then via the properties menu of the new "on The Web"-tasklist set the correct URL again.
There seems to be no direct manual reload available, though quitting the application and restarting online work seems to do a reload too.
Automatic (repeatedly after some duration) reloads can be set.
Evolution connected to our egw example account , gives the view below:
Evolution weekview via the remote icalsrv connected to egroupware.
Notice that the task hierarchy display (task and subtasks) and the percentage complete is not available in Evolution.
....TBW....
The famous client for the mac: iCal see http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ical/
Here are some observations (thanks to sfque)
- OSX- iCal seems in its standard configuration to produce iCalendar data version 2.0.
- OSX iCal 2.0 produces various extenstion fields in its ical data like X-WR-RELCALID, X-WR-CALNAME and X-WR-TIMEZONE. These are all ignored by icalsrv!
- OSX iCal 2.0 produces (apparently in its standards settings) date-times with times set relative to timezone definitions that are defined in the icaldata. (so called VTIMEZONE components). In icalsrv (or better egwical) timezone component parsing is not yet supported (at least till v0.9.37-ng-a1). So these timesettings will be interpreted as being in localtime (of the server in case of icalsrv).
- Note:
- if you have the opportunity to let iCal produce UTC time settings, this would be a solution.
until release 1.2.1 of Egw, the iCalendar.php has a bug that lets icaldata with VTIMEZONE elements in it produce warnings. You can apply the iCalendar-vtimezone-component-warning-removal-jvl20060117.diff patch to solve this.
Since early 2006 there is a sourceforge project that leverages the Outlook2003 program by providing a plugin to do ical over http:
Outlook with RemoteCalendars-plugin see http://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars
......
... I hope to get reports of other clients too.
Good luck.
JVL
etc.
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