[Solved] iCal format using Ditto?

138 Posts

sderuiter Reply #1, 17 years, 11 months ago

Hi,

I have the EasyEvents snippet setup and a separate Ditto call listing all events in chronological order. I was wondering how I can generate an iCal feed that viewers can subscribe to, f.e. in Google Calendar. I thought the JSON format in Ditto would be a good start. I may be able to feed this into iCalCreator, or am I mssing the bigger picture here?

Thanks.

MODX Staff
2,502 Posts

Jay Gilmore Reply #2, 17 years, 11 months ago

It shouldn’t be that hard to do. You need to just get an iCal template with the tags etc. I would think that RSS would actually be the way to go but I am not 100% sure since I’ve never build an iCal feed.

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138 Posts

sderuiter Reply #3, 17 years, 11 months ago

How would you go about creating an iCal template? And more importantly, why? I should be able to query the database for all relevant fields, I thought.

4,205 Posts

dev_cw Reply #4, 17 years, 11 months ago

You need the template of the format, not necessarily an actual template. First off there are 2 types of icalfiles, the ones you download and the ones that create live feeds to your ical app.

To do the second (feed) you can:
1) create a new document
2) set template to "blank"
3) set the content type to text/plain
4) set the Content Disposition to inline
5) turn off RTE

in the content field (with no RTE active) put the "template" for the ical feed:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
X-WR-CALNAME: [*longtitle*]
PRODID:-//Apple Computer\, Inc//iCal 2.0//EN
[!Ditto? &parents=`12` &display=`all` &tpl=`ical_tpl`!]
END:VCALENDAR

and then create the tpl chunk for the ical format:

BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:[+eventDate_start:date=`%Y%d%mT%H%M%SZ`+]
DTEND:[+eventDate_end:isnot="":then=`[+eventDate_end:date=`%Y%d%mT%H%M%SZ`+]`+]
SUMMARY:[+longtitle+]
DTSTAMP:[+editedon:date=`%Y%d%mT%H%M%SZ`+]
END:VEVENT

Add more parameters as needed.

Then use the webcal protocol when creating the link:
webcal://domain.tld/path/to/cal/feed

This has worked for me. I think that to turn this into the download file type of ical document you would need to simply change the Content Disposition to attachment and not use the webcal in the link, but I have never used it like this.

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138 Posts

sderuiter Reply #5, 17 years, 11 months ago

Thanks for this! I’ve tweaked the template only slightly and got a working feed to import in Google Calendar. Need to get working on the definitions, I guess, since the feed seems to be showing all day events in a funny way.
But this template has gotten me working in the right direction.

Thanks again.

174 Posts

nos Reply #6, 17 years, 4 months ago

Hi, for me the thing is not yet solved.
It works so far as the iCal (.ics) is produced and looks as it should (in an editor). But it will not load in Windows Calendar nor in Thunderbird (not a propper file format).
The Problem as far as I see may be the linefeeds in the DESCRIPTION part. If I delete all content exept for one line it will load. There’s no difference to be seen between an .ics that works and mine.
btw. content type is text/plain, template blank, RTF off, Content Disposition to inline (download) .