Google calendar related Fabrik features after 18.11.2015?

[Jaanus]

Google announced that the Google Calendar XML feeds will not be available since November 18.

I think this will have impact to Fabrik users because as I know, at least Google calendar cron plugin is using exactly gcalendar xml. Am I right? And if yes, should we then expect any code changes or (temporary) suspension of gcalendar cron plugin? Or...?

The original message sent by Google:

Important announcement about XML feeds in Google Calendar

Because of low usage, and in an effort to streamline our services, from 18 November 2015, XML feeds will no longer be available in Google Calendar. You're getting this message because you're currently viewing or sharing a link to one or more of your calendars using an XML feed.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Google Calendar will continue to support three ways of viewing your calendars in other applications or on websites. You can:

• Access your calendar in other applications, such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Calendar, using iCal.
• Embed your calendar in your website or blog using HTML.
• Use the Google Calendar API to display, create and modify calendar events if you're a developer.

Finally, you can always view and manage your calendars using the Google Calendar app for Android, iPhone or on the web.

- The Calendar team

 

[Jaanus]

Got answer from conversation with cheesegrits:
"... it only affects the gcalsync cron plugin, which is hosed anyway because they closed down the v2 API early this year, and Zend haven't released a v3 lib.
It's on my list to recode using the native Google API."

 

[dimdim]

I know I'm kinda of ressurecting an old thread, but I've searched the forums for a while and I couldn't find an answer.

Is there a way now to sync a google calendar with one of your lists? Either a two way sync, or sending data from your list to a google calendar.

If it still doesn't work, is there a way to export your list's data in a proper .ics format and then use this as a url feed for your google calendar?

 

[cheesegrits]

Nope, I haven't had time to work on this yet. It's on my list for early this year.

Unfortunately the v3 API is a lot more work than the V2, as it requires OAuth v2, so I have to add a complex step to the plugin config to handle opening a popup to the Google auth page, and storing the resulting token. Similar to the way the Fabrik twitter plugin has to do it.

-- hugh

 

[dimdim]

Thanks for the reply. Fabrik is a great component really and it's only little details that are missing like this.

Regarding the 2nd part of my question, is there some ready script or plugin to export a list's data to a proper .ics format that I can point a Google calendar to that URL so at least

If not I'll have to do it from scratch I guess, but if I do it as a script with a cron job every 10 minutes or so with a big SELECT * I don't know how much taxing will it be for the server's CPU to create the .ics file that Google calendar will read.

 

[cheesegrits]

I have been thinking about adding an ICS option, probably to the Full Calendar visualization. Unfortunately it's not as simple as just building a format=ics view, as when rendering ICS you have to know which element in a list is the start date, end date, title, etc. Which is why I'm thinking of including it in the Full Calendar viz, as the viz settings for that already include all of the element mappings we need to build an ICS output. So even if you don't use the actual calendering part of the viz, there would still be a URL you could use to get a raw ICS output.

I had a look last night, and it seems that this:

https://github.com/jasvrcek/ICS

... is a good place to start. It's available as a composer package:

https://packagist.org/packages/jsvrcek/ics

... which makes including it with Fabrik a lot easier, as we don't then have to fork the original github repo and include their code in our github.

This is something I may take a run at soon. It would be a useful addition to Fabrik. But depending on your project deadlines, that may well not happen in the kind of timeframe you need. Of course one option is for you to fund the work - what we offer when someone needs something that we think would be a useful feature to add to Fabrik is a 50/50 deal, where we only charge for half the hours, and we retain rights to the code.

As to how taxing it would be, that kind of depends how many rows you need to export.

-- hugh