2

My application (php/laravel, but irrelevant here) holds calendar entries for its users (comparable to a car logbook), and some users want to sync those events to their calendar app of choice. I started looking into the ics standard (RFC 5545 etc.) and created an endpoint that generates those files.

Problem: The files are getting huge. Some users have their entire driving history with hundreds and thousands of entries in the application, generating and transfering those MBs of ICS files will take ages (using php, anyways), let alone doing that everytime the calendar app tries to sync.

Question(s): What is the preferred way of dealing with huge ICS documents? HTTP headers and caching is one thing, but how do other people solve this problem? Just send events of the last year? Is there a (pagination?) spec that I haven't found yet?

Community
  • 1
  • 1
jeyemgfx
  • 67
  • 8

1 Answers1

0

This is historical data, so it is not going to change. You could offer batches by time period and cache the historical batches. Last years, or anything before the last 4 weeks, never gets updated for example. They do a one-off import of each historical batch into a separate 'driving history' calendar. No more subscribing? Or maybe they can only subscribe for the last month say?

One cannot import & subscribe into the same calendar, so it does mean they would have at least 2 calendars - 1 historical calendar used for imports, and 1 'current' that will update with yesterday's ride. Of course there is then manual effort for anyone who wants to always have the old data as when events fall off the 'current' calendar, at some point they'd have to go import the latest 'old' events.

anmari
  • 3,830
  • 1
  • 15
  • 15