CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

When attempting to "Download iCalendar File" from the link on a CiviEvent page the following error appears in Outlook...

Cannot import vCalendar file.
This error can appear if you have attempted to save a recurring Lunar appointment in iCalendar format. To avoid this error, set the appointment option to Gregorian instead of Lunar.

What should I be looking for to correct the error?

Drupal 6.4, CiviCRM 2.1

I did do some digging around and Outlook is set up as Gregorian by default which makes me believe that CiviEvent is set to Lunar. I wondered if there was an option within CiviEvent to modify Gregorian/Lunar date format?

A bit more digging and I found:
http://microformats.org/wiki/icalendar-implementations#Microsoft_Outlook_2003
and
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-July/004917.html

Apparently one potential solution is to change the version number from 2.0 to 1.0 in the feed that is generated in CiviEvent

Another bit of info is that UID and DTSTAMP are required for Outlook to import

You can easily modify CiviEvent's iCal output by creating a custom copy of this template - and changing the version to 1 in your copy:
.. templates/CRM/Core/Calendar/ICal.tpl

That said, revisiting the 2.0 iCalendar standard (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt) I discovered what looks to be an inconsistency. In the VEVENT component section, the DTSTAMP property is listed as optional (Section 4.6.1). However, later in the document (4.8.7.2) :-( ...

Conformance: This property MUST be included in the "VEVENT", "VTODO",
   "VJOURNAL" or "VFREEBUSY" calendar components.

So I guess we should be including this property - which is supposed to be a UTC date-time on which the iCal output file was created (e.g. date( ) ).
I've added this to an existing 2.2 issue:

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2711

If you can work up a patch for the existing code which meets Outlook's req's and works in other common iCalendar applications - or at least verify that you have a version of ICal.tpl that works with Outlook, that would be most helpful.

BTW - I figured out that you can add a current date-stamp in the tpl file using a smarty function (i.e. without modifying the associated PHP file to pass it in) - however I didn't find a way to make it UTC (GMT). For the purposes of trying things out, you can add this line into your custom tpl and it should spit out a local date-stamp. I've appended to 'Z' which is really not right - since that "means" this is UTC time - but might be needed for Outlook :-)

DTSTAMP:{$smarty.now|date_format:'%Y%m%d%H%M%S'}Z


version changed to 1.0....not sure what is lost by deleting the "DTSTAMP:" line

DTSTAMP simply indicates the date-time that this ical feed or file was created - so it would only be useful to track "most recent version" of the events, to-do's etc. listings. We will include it in 2.2.

there seems to be a missing space in the output between the address and city fields - in both versions.

Not sure what you mean. In CiviEvent output? or ??

Another question: what is the proper convention?
Should the download to the desktop application (Outlook/other) from the event page be:
 
"» Download iCalendar File" link
 
Or the
 
"ICAL" icon?

The link and the icon do 2 different things. The "Download ..." link should tell the browser to download the data as an .ics file (which then can be imported into Outlook or Apple's iCalendar application etc.). The icon just sends the ical data directly to the browser (or any ical feed reader which accesses  that URL).