Okay, after much trial and error, I figured out the extremely annoying issues... Here is a code fragment that should be very useful for anyone else trying to make an iCalendar that works with Outlook... I'm sure there's a better way to get the GMT time, as my way is a total hack. I'm in PST btw, 7 hours from GMT, and I set the party events to be 6 hours long arbitrarily. Adjust as desired. Outlook is EXTREMELY picky about the formatting and \n stuff I found that using <?= $prow['party_name'] ?> for example didn't work. I'm not sure if PHP puts an extra character or something, that's why I use the echo instead and force a \n on there. The UID is required I think, didn't seem to work without one. This part threw me off for a bit -- your DESCRIPTION: must be ONE long line with literal \n (not the escaped version, but a \\n if you will). Another annoyance, is that if you split the time over multiple days, it doesn't seem to want to play nice. It puts in two entries sorta. By sorta, I mean, that if you look at the calendar you'll see one from 9pm-12am, then another on the next day from 12am-3am for example. You can click either and it brings up the same event. I would prefer one of those bars or something that spans the days instead of the way it looks now. After much debugging and experimenting, it seems this is a problem with Outlook. If an event isn't longer than a certain amount of time, it doesn't warrant one of those bars. Ugh! POS. Anyways, to see this in action: http://www.rollinballzcrew.com/nextparty.phtml -------------------- snip %< snip ----------------------- if (isset($_GET['id']) && intval($_GET['id'] > 0)) { $sql = "SELECT *, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(party_date) AS start, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_ADD(party_date, INTERVAL 6 HOUR)) AS end, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_ADD(party_date, INTERVAL 7 HOUR)) AS GMTstart, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_ADD(DATE_ADD(party_date, INTERVAL 6 HOUR), INTERVAL 7 HOUR)) AS GMTend, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_ADD(NOW(), INTERVAL 7 HOUR)) AS GMTnow FROM party_table WHERE party_id = ".intval($_GET['id'])." LIMIT 1"; //echo $sql; $pth = mysql_query($sql, $db); if ($pth && mysql_num_rows($pth) == 1) { $prow = mysql_fetch_array($pth,MYSQL_ASSOC); //http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/chow20021007.php3?page=2 //http://www.sitellite.org/docs/Date/vCal.html //http://www.scheduleworld.com/outlookInteroperability.html //http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt //http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8159 //$Filename = "RBC_Event" . $_GET['id'] . ".vcs"; //header("Content-Type: text/x-vCalendar"); $Filename = "RBC Event [" . $_GET['id'] . "].ics"; header("Content-Type: text/Calendar"); header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=".$Filename); //$DescDump = str_replace("\r", "=0D=0A", $prow['party_description']); $DescDump = str_replace(array("\r\n","\r",'<p>','<P>','<BR>','<br>'), "\\n", $prow['party_description']); $vCalStart = date("Ymd\THi00", $prow['GMTstart']); $vCalEnd = date("Ymd\THi00", $prow['GMTend']); $vCalNow = date("Ymd\THi00", $prow['GMTnow']); ?> BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:RBC Web Calendar METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART:<?= $vCalStart ?>Z DTEND:<?= $vCalEnd ?>Z LOCATION:<?php echo $prow['party_location']."\n" ?> TRANSP:OPAQUE SEQUENCE:0 UID:1234567890<?= rand(1111111111,9999999999); ?>RBC DTSTAMP:<?= $vCalNow ?>Z DESCRIPTION:<?php echo $DescDump."\n"; ?> SUMMARY:<?php echo $prow['party_name']."\n"; ?> PRIORITY:1 X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:2 CLASS:PUBLIC BEGIN:VALARM TRIGGER:-PT60M ACTION:DISPLAY DESCRIPTION:Reminder END:VALARM END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR <?php exit; } else if (!$pth) { echo "<FONT COLOR=#FF0000>Calendar<P><PRE>".mysql_errno().": ".mysql_error()."<BR></PRE></FONT>\n"; exit; } } //if vcal -------------------- snip %< snip ----------------------- > -----Original Message----- > From: Daevid Vincent [mailto:daevid@xxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2005 5:53 PM > To: php-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > Cc: ceo@xxxxxxxxx > Subject: RE: iCalendar creation not working with Outlook > > > *IS* it a Lunar based event, rather than Gregorian?... > > Honestly, I don't even know what the difference is. All I > know is I want an > event to appear on the date/time I gave it. I believe that > error message is > NOT the true problem (google searches all point to "\n" being > the culprit) > > > > It works fine in KOrganizer (KDE), Entorage (Mac OS-X), > > > iCal. I couldn't figure out how to get Evolution to use it. > > > > What works fine? > > > > The event? > > Yes. If someone using KDE clicks on the link, it puts an > entry in their > KOrganizer. If someone with Entourage clicks, it goes to > iCalendar. And > since my post, a friend that uses Evolution, clicked, saved > the .ics file, > and imported it into Evolution via their import wizard > (Evolution apparently > isn't smart enough to directly import via the web). > > > Are you suggesting that Outlook might not have implemented the full > > specification, and has some hokey hacked-up crap instead? > > Say it's not true! > > [that was sarcasm, in case you missed it...] > > Yeah. I get the sarcasm. Unfortunately, that's not helping. > 90% of the world > uses Outlook. > > > > I find tons of people complaining on Google about this > > error message, but > > > no > > > real solution but to use "\n" -- which I have done I think. > > I have even > > > commented out the DESCRIPTION field, and that didn't help. > > > > > > Does anyone have a real working example, class, snippet, > > whatever for an > > > iCalendar generator that works in Outlook? > > > Dump out a working Outlook iCalendar item/entry/object thingie. > > Get the output from your code. > > Where are they different? > > Yes. I supposed that is the next step. I just thought there > might exist a > class or snippet out there that actually works. I mean, you'd > think that > this was a pretty common task, yet the PEAR site has nothing! > And I found > one tutorial, which obviously is outdated and therefore > slightly broken. > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
