Open webcal URI with Outlook

Question

I have a webcal:// link that I wish to open with Microsoft Outlook. When I click the link, it automatically launches the default iOS Calendar. The link is a shared calendar.

I would like to provide the ability for the User to open the file with Outlook.

I found the below URI scheme (in another SO answer) to add an individual item to the Calendar, but not subscribe to a shared one.

ms-outlook://events/new?title=yourTitle

Sample Calendar file:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Access-A-Ride Pickup
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20130802T103400
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20130802T110400
LOCATION:1000 Broadway Ave.\, Brooklyn
DESCRIPTION: Access-A-Ride to 900 Jay St.\, Brooklyn
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SEQUENCE:3
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT10M
DESCRIPTION:Pickup Reminder
ACTION:DISPLAY
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Access-A-Ride Pickup
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20130802T200000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20130802T203000
LOCATION:900 Jay St.\, Brooklyn
DESCRIPTION: Access-A-Ride to 1000 Broadway Ave.\, Brooklyn
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SEQUENCE:3
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT10M
DESCRIPTION:Pickup Reminder
ACTION:DISPLAY
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Answer 1

For universal calendar application acceptance use the default RFC545 http/s protocol (ie change webcal for http/s). Apple applications will accept the http/s. Webcal is apple's unofficial protocol. If a calendar application doesn't like it, one can usually just change it to http/s and the apple server will still serve up the ics content.

Note further that the application opened will then depend on the users default file type / open application setting for .ics files (just as per other file types).

See https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/1-introduction.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar.

Note also for an application to be happy with an ics url, the mime type must be text/calendar and the .ics must be 'valid' according to specifications.