If I create a recurring event in iOS and then delete some of the recurrence items, how do I find that out from the EKEvent object? I'm not seeing where it stores the list of exclusions.
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So I keep initial date and recurrence cycle on MongoDB, I want to check everyday if today there is an occurrence, if so I want to send notification to user.
Currently my plan is to aggregate on MongoDB and use recurrence library on Golang and check date. After that with job scheduling sending a notification to every user.
My question is, is it the right way? Wouldn't it be "expensive" to create job for each user or is there a better way to handle this case?
My application (php/laravel, but irrelevant here) holds calendar entries for its users (comparable to a car logbook), and some users want to sync those events to their calendar app of choice. I started looking into the ics standard (RFC 5545 etc.) and created an endpoint that generates those files.
Problem: The files are getting huge. Some users have their entire driving history with hundreds and thousands of entries in the application, generating and transfering those MBs of ICS files will take ages (using php, anyways), let alone doing that everytime the calendar app tries to sync.
Question(s): What is the preferred way of dealing with huge ICS documents? HTTP headers and caching is one thing, but how do other people solve this problem? Just send events of the last year? Is there a (pagination?) spec that I haven't found yet?
This is historical data, so it is not going to change. You could offer batches by time period and cache the historical batches. Last years, or anything before the last 4 weeks, never gets updated for example. They do a one-off import of each historical batch into a separate 'driving history' calendar. No more subscribing? Or maybe they can only subscribe for the last month say?
One cannot import & subscribe into the same calendar, so it does mean they would have at least 2 calendars - 1 historical calendar used for imports, and 1 'current' that will update with yesterday's ride. Of course there is then manual effort for anyone who wants to always have the old data as when events fall off the 'current' calendar, at some point they'd have to go import the latest 'old' events.
The app I'm developing will write events to a calendar on the user's phone. I was thinking of preceeding my app's event with a prefix like myapp: so I can find my events in the event store to display in a tableview.
However, it seems that the only predicate available is based upon a start and end date (– predicateForEventsWithStartDate:endDate:calendars:) when I review the ios eventkit framework. Am I reading that right?
Should I just then create a calendar for just my app on the phone or is there another way to identify my events beside dates?
Thanks in advance.
One other option would be to have local storage (sqlite, coredata etc...) which indexes into the event. Each event has as event id and you can you retrieve the event from the store via eventWithIdentifier.
Not sure what your data access patterns are but that also allows you to quickly store data within your app that you can query effieciently (with a powerful predicates and sql syntax). Your local results could just return eventIds and in the the table view call backs you get the id for that row and retrieve from the events store.
Just another option ...
I'm in the middle of building a simple iPhone calendar app, & I really do need only simple functionality - add event, update event, delete event, with the only complexity being the events need to have the option of being recurring or single. I have managed the add & delete event bit easily enough, but I'm finding it impossible to do the other bits, namely -
add an event with recurrences (ie, up to a certain date, every x days, etc)
edit an existing event, so that it recurrs or stops recurring
edit a specific recurrence of a recurring event / or all recurrences
I think I can manage the other stuff, but the GData documentation seems almost non-existent (if anyone can point me to some meaningful objective-c docs for the GData stuff, I'd be a really happy bunny - at the moment I'm gradually trawling through all its code to try & figure out how to use it)
Any code samples for the above would be very much appreciated!
Many thanks.
add event with recurrences:
Recurrences are expressed in iCalendar format. You have to fortunately know only fields DTSTART, DTEND, EXDATE, RDATE, RRULE. Also notice, that alarms are placed in the root of xml event entry. (You cannot use when and recurrence tag together). Google calendar web app does not mark RDATE, EXDATE, but understands them and other applications can mark them.
edit recurring event:
If you are able to post normal and recurring event it should be no problem to update it. I tested update to google from normal to recurring and back without no problem.
edit a specific recurrence of a recurring event
Exceptions from recurrence are expressed as new events (confirmed or canceled) which have link (in tag) originalEvent to the recurring event. Be aware that modification of a field in a recurring event can automatically change the field in the events exceptions (e.g. title). If you remove the originalEvent while updating to google, google silently ignores it.
I'm working on an App that needs to remember events selected by the user from their calendar and I've run into a problem with recurring events.
For non-recurring events I can just store the eventIdentifier and fetch the event from the Event Store when I need it.
But recurring events all share the same eventIdentifier. When I go back to the Event Store to fetch the event (based on the eventIdentifier) I get the very first event in the recurrence chain ... not the Nth recurrence of the event that the user selected.
I can't persist the user selected events by archiving the entire EKEvent object since EventKit doesn't support NSCoding.
I'm considering storing the eventIdentifier and Start & End dates so that I can fetch the correct event from the Event Store ... but that seems pretty kludgy and might make tracking changes the user makes in their calendar between launches of my App tricky.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
The event identifier alone is not enough even for non recurring events. Indeed, it can change when the user moves the event to a different calendar. For recurring events, it may change upon detaching an occurrence or splitting the recurrence.Therefore, it is common practice to search for events using a subset of information (say title, start and due date). You should not rely on event identifiers.
Unfortunately, the framework does not provide us with the raw data of an event, it just provides all of the occurrences of the events in a specified interval. Therefore, there is no such thing (using the framework) as the possibility of retrieving a single recurring event and then expanding its recurrence to get its n-th occurrence: you need to manually post-process the retrieved events in order to find the ones you are interested to.
The problem here is that the APIs provided are not meant for sync purposes. Many developers have complained and still complain about this by filing a bug/feature request using Radar. Until now, Apple answer about is that the APIs fulfill a different purpose, since sync is automatic. However, this is true when syncing through iTunes, but not programmatically.