CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've been searching and reading about getting the events entered via CiviEvent to display in Drupal's Calendar module. My event organizers, while very experienced in Texas nature topics, are not experienced computer users. It's got to be as simple as possible.

If my understanding is correct, every time there is a change in CiviEvents, our Event Organizers will need to download  'civicrm_ical.ics' to their computer and then upload the file to our server.

I am used to operating in Perl, new to php and CiviCRM, so I am offering this solution as an amateur. Wouldn't it be easy to add a function to save 'civicrm_ical.ics'?

You would need to start with a blank file as /drupal/files/civicrm/crm_docs/civicrm_ical.ics.

Add the function to /modules/civicrm/utils/iCalendar.php.

function overwrite_ics($filename, $format)
{
  $myFile = "/files/CRM/crm_docs/$filename";
  $fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
  fwrite($fh, $format);
  fwrite($fh, $format);
  fclose($fh);
}
You could activate it in /modules/civicrm/Event/Page/iCalendar.php.

...other stuff
 require_once "CRM/Utils/ICalendar.php";
 $format = CRM_Utils_ICalendar::iCalendar( $info );

 if( $iCalPage == 1) {
      echo $format;
       exit();
 }

 CRM_Utils_ICalendar::send( 'civicrm_ical.ics', 'attachment', 'utf-8', $format );
 CRM_Utils_ICalendar::overwrite_ics( 'civicrm_ical.ics', $format );
 exit( );

Quickly describing what has been done on our demo instance (http://demo.civicrm.org/):

1. Install calendar module (and two others required by it: views and date)
2. Allow anonymous users to register for events in CiviCRM (this will make the iCal file accessible to everyone)
3. Go to Administer CiviCRM -> Manage Events and copy the link under "Browse iCalendar Listing"
3. Go to calendar and add new iCal feed source using the link you copied above.

There is probably also the matter of making calendar refresh the feed periodically with cron job - I didn't check this.

michau

The links to both the iCalendar "feed" and to "download" an .ics file are both displayed on the Administer CiviCRM >> Manage Events page. In the demo site, go to:
http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/civicrm/admin/event?reset=1

You'll see the links above the listing of events. Copy and paste them to wherever you want to expose them (or enter them in a iCal capable calendar).

For our demo, the iCal feed is:
http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/civicrm/event/ical?reset=1&page=1

Hi
Did the documentation referred to get published yet?
I am struggling with an "Invalid input file" error when I enter my iCal feed into Calendar

(my feed is http://192.168.61.132/drupal/index.php?q=civicrm/event/ical&reset=1&page=1)

I'm sure I can find the solution eventually but it is feeling like hard work to get this working...

Thanks
Keith