There's a lot of events happening all the time on my university campus, and, together with a few other students, we thought it would be nice to provide the event schedule as a calendar. So organisers register their event on the intranet, and it gets added to an icalendar file which people on the campus can subscribe to.
This works great when people load the calendar url on their iPhones, but it doesn't when loading in Google Calendar. We have noticed two problems:
When you subscribe to the calendar and then log out and back in, events are no longer visible. Sometimes, clicking refresh fixes it. The vents do not disappear from android devices associated with your account.
When an event is removed from the icalendar file (eg. if it's cancelled), it still remains on the android devices that sync with any google account that subscribed to the calendar. New events sync fine, though, so it's not that the sync didn't happen.
Do you know how I can solve these two problems? I've noticed the STATUS:CANCELLED property in VEVENTs, but it doesn't seem to work when the calendar method is PUBLISH.
Thanks!
PS: If you can suggest a way to test changes faster that waiting for Google to pull the changes from the server, it would be great; right now, I have to wait about 6 hours between each test...
my understanding is that removing it from the file is not the way to cancel an event. One must ensure that there is a UNIQUE identifier to match any changes.
Also must follow the spec for cancelling/changing an event.
See How to cancel an calendar event using ics files?
If all of that is correct, then the various applications that 'subscribe' to a calendar should in theory update the event status when they read the updated file. Unfortunately the speed and frequency of that is up to that application. (NB: note also difference between subscribe and "import")
Yes I have noticed that google is slow to update sometimes. Only thing I can think of is use another application where you have control perhaps over the subscription update frequency to test if the way that you are cancelling an event is working. Once you see the cancellations happening there, then resume testing on google (I have noticed Google is more pedantic than some apps, so you may still have to work to get it 100% working on google.)
Hope that helps!
I've tried the suggestions but Google Calendar only ever adds another event. The iCalendar validators say that the files I generate are valid, and iCal on the Mac removes an event if it has cancel information. But neither Google Calendar or Outlook do. Rather frustrating.
Related
I have a cool flutter app which is used to track staff attendance. A user can check-in and check out when they start/stop working and the app record that event, calculate the number of hours worked and send a weekly summary to the manager of the staff expected wages. The current problem is that some staff members forget to check out (everyone is ok with check-in) so we don’t have good numbers and we need to manually change the attendance. I would like to add something to remember them to check out, and I am looking for creative ideas to do so. My objective is to make something very affordable.
So far I thought about two options:
to use geolocation and track when staff get in/out of a certain location and log it as check-in and check out
to set a timer when they start the shift and send a local notification if after xx hours they have not done the checkout
Geolocation seems to be the best because I can even automate the checkin/check out and do it in the backend but it will consme lots of resources in the client because I would need to check their location every while even when their at at home or on holiday...
The timer has some limits and still, I would need to manage background tasks that are complex as well as imprecise checkout depengin on when the notification goes out.
Do you have any suggestions on anything simple to implement?
I would suggest the second option.
A simple scheduler which would look for all the employees who are checked in for more than x number of hours and then throw a clickable notification to checkout. It would be an easy and clean solution. However, it has several limitations as an employee might leave early but checkout later.
In my opinion, Your most clean solution would be to have an RFID/NFC check which automatically registers as a user checks out from the building.
Another thing that can be done if your employees are working mostly on their computers. There can be a browser extension or a web app which will clock in the time they are working on their laptops. Once they close it they will be automatically checked out.
I am working on an ionic project. It is based on medication managing.And I want to remind the user about their medications. I am new to this and can some one give me a sample code, link or something to create reminders.
I would recommend taking a look at Local Notifications, they are notifications that can be scheduled on the device without the need for a server. It is commonly used for things like reminders. You can also choose to do this using a server with Push Notifications, but that doesn't seem necessary in your situation.
For starters, take a look at the documentation for Local Notifications, see if it works for your use case.
I'm having a problem with the events I'm sending to Facebook Insights. I've got about 15 custom events I'm sending, and they all carry a data object that is pretty consistent between all the events. 10 of the events show up with the data object working fine (see graphic User Logged In/Out events), and for the rest, I'm getting "No data is available for the current selection." (see graphic Story Played/Selected events).
I believe with one event I shortened the Event Type, and the data started displaying properly. I tried this with other events, and that didn't fix the problem. Has anyone had this sort of problem before, and could you please comment about your solution?
I'm using Adobe AIR for mobile, running on Android, using the Milkman Games GoViral ANE. Another important factor here is that I'm sending these exact same events to a different analytics service - Mixpanel. All the events look correct on Mixpanel, so I'm pretty sure I'm sending them out properly. My assumption at the moment is that Facebook doesn't like something specific about some of my events.
I'm interested in any comments about this general kind of issue, regardless of platform or implementation, to see if I can figure out what's going wrong. I know my app setup is not so common, so for the sake of this question I'd like to ignore that for the time being.
Thanks in advance for any help you might provide.
I answered my own question. It turns out Facebook Insights events have a limit of 10 properties per event. Once I reduced the data being sent, the other events started tracking properly.
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.