icalendar and Rails
I’ve recently used icalendar to output an ical from a Rails app I’m running. It’s incredibly simple, here’s what I did:
- Create an ical_controller:
script/generate controller ical
- Add a method to generates the events:
require 'icalendar' class IcalController < ApplicationController caches_page :competitions def competitions @cal = Icalendar::Calendar.new Competition.find_all.each do |comp| event = Icalendar::Event.new event.start = comp.date event.end = comp.date event.summary = comp.name @cal.add event end end end - Create a view (app/views/ical/competitions.rhtml):
< %= @cal.to_ical %>
- Install icalendar into your vendor directory:
cd vendor gem unpack icalendar
- Add the necessary dependency to config/environment.rb
require 'icalendar-0.96.4/lib/icalendar'
And that’s it. Once deployed you can access your ical and import it anywhere. I’ve tried mine out with Google Calendar and it imported without a hitch. One deficiency in icalendar is the inability to give a name or description to the calendar itself, so you’ll have to rename it in your calendar application. The only caveat in the above code is the caching directive in the controller. I’ve cached the entire page because the events don’t change frequently. To expire the cache you’ll have to add the following line to the appropriate controller methods where your events changes:
expire_page :controller => "ical", :action => "competitions"
September 12th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Have you figured out if it is possible to give the calendar a name?
Did you have utf-8 type of issues. I am german sepaking and we have those umlauts and the calendar app (muzilla sunbird) is complaining and wont read the calendar..
September 12th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
It doesn’t look like the Ruby icalendar package supports names, and I can’t find anything in the RFC about calendar names. I know Google Calendar uses a field called ‘X-WR-CALNAME’, but I don’t know if it’s widespread. It should be trivial to add a name field that outputs that header if you want to.
UTF-8 is trickier. I know Ruby doesn’t have the best support for it. Since everything I did was in English, I didn’t have any problems. You may want to take a look at this page:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings
and the last comment:
September 25th, 2006 at 1:01 am
great mini-tutorial you wrote. thanks!
have you managed to create a recurring event?
September 25th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
I haven’t tried to create a recurring event, but looking at the Event object it does support them. Keep in mind Event is just a data object, the recurrence fields are of type ‘icalmultiproperty’ (defined in component.rb). They are described as:
but from reading the code it’s not obvious to me what to set those fields with. At a guess I’d say it just follows the format from the RFC, e.g.:
Daily for 10 occurrences: DTSTART;TZID=US-Eastern:19970902T090000 RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;COUNT=10 ==> (1997 9:00 AM EDT) September 2-11Try setting the fields with values like that and see what gets outputted, or take an existing icalendar with a recurring event, parse it, then see what values are held in the fields. I’m sure the author would except a patch to extend the Event class to be able to handle friendly configuration of recurring events.
September 30th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
[…] I came across this thread that simplifies the ical controller from my previous example. It correctly sets the content type header and removes the need for a template. The new version is: […]
August 6th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Perhaps a little late to the party but I ran into the same problem. The solution I settled on worked slightly differently. I avoid the include and used the Icalendar namespace.
December 12th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Thanks for the post.
Here, you are exporting iCal file , asking user to save file.
How can we save this .ics file to particular folder in rails, say I want to save this .ics file to ‘/public/ics/’ folder in rails. ?
how can we do this ?
Any Idea ?
thanks,
March 4th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
[…] icalendar and Rails […]
February 5th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
[…] There’s plenty of resources online discussing how easy it is to use the Ruby Icalendar library. However, just following those directions didn’t produce quite the results I was looking for when exporting multi-day events. Using the directions from the previous links, Apple’s iCal app displayed every event as ending one day early. And Google Calendar put “(12:00am?)” in front of the titles. Not exactly seamless integration. A quick Google search didn’t turn up anything useful, so hopefully this solution will save someone else some time. […]