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Subscription to ICAL for Outlook 2007 or Google Calendar Integration

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Robert Strazzarino
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Robert Strazzarino asked on 01 Feb 2008, 07:11 PM
I've got a somewhat wild idea that I would like to propose...

Google Calendar and Outlook 2007 both give the ability to "subscribe" to an internet calendar.  Would it be possible to write an http handler that would "expose" events in the Telerik Scheduler database and provide a read only calendar for Outlook and Google Calendar?

Disclaimer: I have not yet used Telerik Scheduler but plan to dive in once we are out of BETA.  I also do not have a very strong understanding of the .ical format.

Some immediate questions that come to mind:

1. How would recurring events work? (would the http handler automatically "fill in" events for the next 365 days, for example?

2. Is there any way to protect these calendars? (My hunch is no and that is OK)

Some Benefits:

1. Once the handler is set up, you could literally provide step by step instructions for your users on the site to add the calendar to Google or Outlook and it would be a set it and forget it type of deal.

2. I have a client who is constantly trying to juggle his schedule and if he could just "overlay" events on a web application with his Exchange calendar all from Outlook he would be a very happy camper.

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T. Tsonev
Telerik team
answered on 04 Feb 2008, 11:05 AM
Hello Robert,

Thank you for your interest in RadScheduler. Very cool idea, we like it a lot. What is even better is that it can be implemented easy, as RadScheduler already exposes most of the needed functionality.

Both Google Calendar and Outlook expect the calendar data in iCalendar format. We already provide support for exporting RadScheduler events in this format as you can see from this example. Clicking the Export button generates an iCalendar file that contains all of the events. You can then import it in Google Calendar by clicking "Add/Import Calendar" from the "My Calendars" panel.

The recurring events are fully supported by the iCalendar format. We even use it internally to describe them. So, when you export a recurring appointment it is saved as a single appointment that contains the recurrence rule. For example:
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20070330T063000Z
DTEND:20070330T073000Z
RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;UNTIL=20070406T210000Z;INTERVAL=1;BYDAY=MO,TU,WE,TH,FR
SUMMARY:Technical meeting
END:VEVENT
This describes an event that repeats every workday until 2007-04-06 21:00 (UTC).

Exporting the events is done by calling the static ExportToICalendar method (or its overloads), so the http handler has little work to do, besides filtering the appointments to some criteria.

At the moment the ExportToICalendar takes either a single Appointment or an AppointmentCollection. This basically means that you need a reference to a RadScheduler instance if you want to export multiple events, as you cannot freely create and populate an AppointmentsCollection. For the next release we will add overloads that take an IEnumerable of Appointments, so this restriction can be removed.

Regards,
Tsvetomir Tsonev
the Telerik team

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Kenneth Mazur
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answered on 17 Sep 2008, 04:54 AM
I too would like to see this happen.  How do I go about writing an http handler to do what is proposed?  Is there a working sample on the Telerik site I could look at?  Is there a 3rd party example of this being done I could incorporate?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Ken
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Robert Strazzarino
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answered on 17 Sep 2008, 06:41 AM
Sweet man, glad you are interested I was hoping somebody would make it :- )

This should get you started:

http://dev.ektron.com/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=15304
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T. Tsonev
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Kenneth Mazur
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