iCal - Beginner Tutorial and Docs?

Question

I am working with an existing ical file at work. I'm not sure who is creating it, and I would like to become more familiar with ical before I contact them - so I can have an intelligent conversation.

Can someone point me to a good beginner tutorial for iCal?

Most of what I've found so far has been very vague, and assumes too much user knowledge. I need something that covers the basics (tags/parameters, setup, publishing, etc), but also explains things like synching iPhone, Android, and Blackberry with calendar updates on the server.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 07 '21 at 05:54

5

The Wikipedia page on iCalendar includes an overview of the history and basics of the format.

RFC 5545 defines the detail of the format.

Here's a Java library that may help which has Android support

edited Oct 07 '21 at 05:54

Community

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answered Feb 15 '11 at 20:25

Ollie C

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Thanks. I found those links, earlier. They still don't make sense to me, though, which is why I was asking for a tutorial. For example, wiki lists X-PUBLISHED-TTL (update interval). However, the only "interval" references I see in RFC 5545 are for recurring events, not for updating/refreshing the calendar. My assumption is that update interval deals with pushing/pulling calendar changes so that they synch with the phone. I may be wrong, though. Will iCal automatically sync, or do I need to use CalDAV or Microsoft Exchange & ActiveSync? Or something else? – user359519 Feb 15 '11 at 21:49
I've edited my answer to include details of the only iCalendar library I'm aware of for Java. It may be that the class library can help you conceptualise how you might do what you need to do. iCalendar is a file format only, so you will certainly need to consider how you pass that calendar data around, and CalDAV and ActiveSync are your two primary options. FWIW I think Google Calendar supports both. – Ollie C Feb 15 '11 at 22:09
"iCalendar is a file format only... CalDAV and ActiveSync are your two primary options." - Thanks, Ollie. That makes sense - sort of like how XML is a format, only. I will take a closer look at CalDAV and ActiveSync. Maybe I can find tutorials on them. – user359519 Feb 16 '11 at 13:39
The `Java Library` link is no longer valid – Matthew Jun 02 '16 at 19:52

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 11 '11 at 17:19

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This is also a great resource:

http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/ical/

answered Oct 11 '11 at 17:19

Redtopia

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 12 '11 at 09:58

I've not come across what you are asking for - would love to know if it existed.

I have saved the links of the stuff I have found and also made a few notes about ical spec, timezones, nuanaces of all day events, date types (floating etc) etc along the way. These may be useful to you.

See http://icalevents.com/category/notes/ical-events/ and in the sidebar there are two sections of links:

Ical Spec RFC 5545 (some stuff you have already) and Testing Resources.

If you do find any great documentation, please post back here.

iCal - Beginner Tutorial and Docs?

3 Answers3