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Simple processing for iCal calendars Apps
I work for a large company and use Snerdware's GroupCal software to see my company's calendar. I also keep a number of personal calendars. Although I was quite happy that my personal calendar details were published, I wasn't happy that others could see my company's activities. Also, I was concerned that people had to subscribe to three, possibly four, separate calendars to see my overall availability. I looked around for existing solutions to my problem, but I could not find anything in a casual search. I eventually settled on two basic functions that I wanted:
  • concatenation of one calendar's data with another into a single calendar
  • anonymisation of calendar data
Although iCal provides the latter, it did not do so to the degree I wanted (events retained their titles). Also, because of the way Snerdware's solution works, I was unable to publish my company's calendar as it was already subscribed. So I wrote two very basic utilities using Perl regular expressions to process the calendar data. They are very basic and don't do much in themselves -- Mac OS X, UNIX and Apache do the rest.

In order to get around iCal's inability to re-publish subscribed calendar data, I told cron to copy the file on a regular basis to a shared directory. iCal also publishes a number of personal calendars to a WebDAV URL that OS X's Apache server makes available. A separate regular activity concatenates an anonymised version of my company's calendar with the personal calendars into one single calendar file, Personal.ics, that Apache then makes available as a regular URL on the web. The final piece is obviously totally formed around my requirements. But perhaps my scripts will be useful to others wanting to achieve something similar.

I ought to caveat that the scripts have been tested to the extent that, while I know they work for iCal and Mozilla project's Sunbird, they do not produce ideal files. I don't know if other programs will fail to read the files properly. For those of you who are interested or would like to try, I have put the scripts on my webspace -- click here to download. The intended audience is those with some basic UNIX scripting knowledge. I'm interested in knowing if these are useful, so if they're not 100% what you need, maybe I can help tailor them to other requirements.
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Simple processing for iCal calendars
Authored by: kmue on Dec 22, '04 08:54:10AM
Very nice, thanks a lot!
I modified the cat_calendar script to anonymize optionally and changed linefeeds to minimize modifikation of original files. You can find my version here

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Simple processing for iCal calendars
Authored by: denty on Dec 22, '04 09:30:20AM

Someone e-mailed me to say they have an application that does pretty much what I've put in the scripts. I've not tested it yet so I'm not endorsing it. But it might save some from having to learn how to script.

www.buddy.com/ical

denty.



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