Edgar Gonçalves | 26 Mar 22:18
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planner appointments exported to icalendar events


Hi,

after managing to keep all my personal information in Emacs (hooray to
planner, muse, gnus, and bbdb!), I came to the conclusion that the outside
world still uses other tools, and they often ask me for some portions of
information. One of such is my schedule. So I promised to give them an
iCalendar .ics file, and dug into Emacs to code some elisp to make it
work. First, I found icalendar.el, and then planner-ical. Both wouldn't work
for me:
1)  icalendar.el provides a simple API, directed to diary<->icalendar
    migration. It doesn't merge information :(
2) planner-ical.el is a work in progress, I suppose. It only converts tasks
   into VTODO, and only from one page at a time.

So I thought about what I needed:
o export all my future appointments into VEVENTs. This includes cyclic events,
  and tasks with time informations (both handled with planner-appt).
o import a full icalendar into planner. deal with VEVENT, VTODO, VJOURNAL, and
  create, respectively, schedule entries, tasks and notes. add the appointments
  retrieved from the VALARMS.

The code I made today fulfills, although not wonderfully, my first
requirement. I'm using it specially to communicate my availability to my
co-workers. So I added a regexp argument to filter each entry by its planner
category! The only thing I can't seem to manage is to get planner-appt to tell
me the category of a task-appointment. So right now I export all of the tasks!
Anyone knows how I can get this behavior?

Here's the code to export to a ics file:
(Continue reading)

John Sullivan | 27 Mar 04:01

Re: planner appointments exported to icalendar events

Edgar.Goncalves <at> inesc-id.pt (Edgar Gonçalves) writes:

> The code I made today fulfills, although not wonderfully, my first
> requirement. I'm using it specially to communicate my availability to my

I think ideally we would do this as a Muse publishing style.

--

-- 
-John Sullivan
-http://www.wjsullivan.net
-GPG Key: AE8600B6
Jim Ottaway | 27 Mar 11:53
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Re: planner appointments exported to icalendar events

>>>>> John Sullivan <john <at> wjsullivan.net> writes:

> Edgar.Goncalves <at> inesc-id.pt (Edgar Gonçalves) writes:
>> The code I made today fulfills, although not wonderfully, my first
>> requirement. I'm using it specially to communicate my availability to my

> I think ideally we would do this as a Muse publishing style.

I agree that that would be the ideal approach, but it wouldn't find
cyclical appointments on pages that don't exist yet. One would have to
visit each page with a matching cyclical entry first so that they get
created.  So it might actually be better to use Edgar's approach. 

--

-- 
Jim Ottaway
thomas knoll | 27 Mar 21:24

Re: planner appointments exported to icalendar events

It seems like there would be value in making cyclical visit pages
anyway, for web publishing, ical publishing etc... it would be nice to
publish future events.

On 3/27/06, Jim Ottaway <j.ottaway <at> lse.ac.uk> wrote:
> >>>>> John Sullivan <john <at> wjsullivan.net> writes:
>
> > Edgar.Goncalves <at> inesc-id.pt (Edgar Gonçalves) writes:
> >> The code I made today fulfills, although not wonderfully, my first
> >> requirement. I'm using it specially to communicate my availability to my
>
> > I think ideally we would do this as a Muse publishing style.
>
> I agree that that would be the ideal approach, but it wouldn't find
> cyclical appointments on pages that don't exist yet. One would have to
> visit each page with a matching cyclical entry first so that they get
> created.  So it might actually be better to use Edgar's approach.
>
> --
> Jim Ottaway
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> emacs-wiki-discuss mailing list
> emacs-wiki-discuss <at> nongnu.org
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-wiki-discuss
>

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##[.:dydimustk:.]###############
(Continue reading)

Edgar Gonçalves | 27 Mar 22:23
Face

Re: planner appointments exported to icalendar events

This morning, John Sullivan wrote:
> Edgar.Goncalves <at> inesc-id.pt (Edgar Gonçalves) writes:
>
>> The code I made today fulfills, although not wonderfully, my first
>> requirement. I'm using it specially to communicate my availability to my
>
> I think ideally we would do this as a Muse publishing style.

Well, the exporting would be great as a muse publishing style. However, what I
was trying to have (in a long-term point of view) is a full synchronization
system: from an iCalendar file to planner and back again! And I'm not seeing
Muse as the proper tool to deal with such a system... But I'm ok with Muse
being able to publish each planner data type (i.e., task, note or schedule
entry) into the appropriate VCALENDAR node. I could even like Muse to publish
the full iCalendar, if there were a separate merge tool between two
iCalendar's. But I think it would be easier to do the merge with the planner
data, instead of doing it with a couple of text files. Note that this wouldn't
be the only synch-system we (planner users) would need. I'd like to sync my
Symbian SonyEricsson's PIM with planner+bbdb+gnus, one day, for instance!
There's also Yahoo! calendar+etc., Google calendar, etc, etc... This leads me
to one question: is a synchronizing framework needed for Emacs? :)

No matter what the final approach is, I'm now pretty happy with my exporter (it
lacks notes exporting, I haven't got the need to do that, so far).

My next goal now would be to import an ical into a temp diary file, and use
calendar and my modified version of weekly-view to display the entries. From
there, I'd like to have a link/keyboard shortcut to import that (possibly
cyclic) diary entry into my planner. Do you have any suggestions to improve
this behavior?
(Continue reading)


Gmane