adding something to Ical / Outlook with Rails

[Michael Gerstenblatt]

Hi All,

Does anyone know if any ruby or javascript solutions exist that will allow me to have a link that will open up Outlook, Ical, etc and add an event (provided by rails) to their calendar?

Thanks and happy holidays,
Mike

[Phil Darnowsky]

Hi Mike,

iCalendar has a defined MIME type (text/calendar), so something like this should work, provided the browser has the right association set for that type:

response.content_type = 'text/calendar'
render :text => @event.to_ical

I don't know of any library that will automatically implement that to_ical method, and I'm far too lazy to look, but the iCalendar format seems like it would be really simple to implement.

--Phil

--- On Thu, 12/24/09, Michael Gerstenblatt <mgerst...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Pascal Rettig]

Hi Mike,

There's a icalendar gem (http://icalendar.rubyforge.org/) we used a while back.

We did something like this a couple of years ago for displaying event bookings (RDoc's probably more up to date):

require 'icalendar'

cal = Icalendar::Calendar.new
bookings.each do |booking|
      event = Icalendar::Event.new
      event.start = booking.to_time.strftime("%Y%m%dT%H%M%S")
      event.end = booking.to_end_time.strftime("%Y%m%dT%H%M%S")
      event.summary = booking.recipient_name + " " + booking.time
      cal.add_event(event)
    end

send_data(cal.to_ical,:type => 'text/calendar', :disposition => 'inline; filename=calendar.vcs', :filename => 'calendar.vcs')


-Pascal

-- Pascal Rettig Cykod.com pas...@cykod.com Ph# 857-363-0597

[Dan Croak]

It seems to me like there should be a really good microformats gem that handles this.

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

I should be able to:

sudo gem install microformats

Then, it could be mixed into whatever view layer you're using like:

<%= hCalendar(event) %>

<%= hCard(person) %>

<%= hCard(company) %>

<%= hCard(place) %>

The hCalendar microformat should meet Mike's needs and the others are becoming more handy as browsers implement these two "stable" microformats.

For example, when you use the the "tel" property, mobile Safari on the iPhone turns that into a link that when you click, you can call the number.

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard#note2

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/putyourcontentinmypocket/

Looking on github, the closest that currently exists is:

* mofo, which does microformat *parsing*, not HTML generation

* microformats_helper, which is a Rails plugin (no Sinatra love) and does the hCard but not hCalendar microformat

Dan Croak
@Croaky

[Keenan Brock]

Microformats are all about adding meta data to your markup.

There is no real way the generator could know if you want a paragraph style (with spans) or a block structure (li, p, or div)

It works best for me if I basically ignore the micro format, put in the information in HTML, then add spans/classes/titles accordingly.

--K