Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Support for iCalendar?

[<bb...@ma...>]

On Saturday, Apr 19, 2003, at 05:36 US/Eastern, Dinu Gherman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wonder if iCalendar is equally well supported by PyObjC as the
> Address-Book application on OS X? I tried to figure out the ICS
> format it imports and exports from my own files and specs like
> this: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2445.html but there seem to be
> many magic IDs which I can't make much sense of. So I hesitate
> to seriously convert data to such a format and do a lot of trial
> and error testing.

It isn't so much a PyObjC support issue as it is a published API issue. 
  The AddressBook API was made public and mostly documented by Apple 
with the release of OS X 10.2.

The iCal API and the backing store behind it (there is a lot more going 
on than just the application itself) is still all private API.

With that said, the ICS format is very well documented via the RFC.   
For the purposes of exporting to iCal, it isn't that hard to write data 
that iCal can easily import.    As well, the publish/subscribe 
mechanism generally "just works" using the RFC documented formats.

In the context of PyObjC, I wrote a custom Cocoa client to the Web 
Service API of Intent (www.intentcenter.com -- if it complains about 
https, switch the URL to http... we have a certificate issue).  You 
could subscribe to the data from iCal (the Cocoa app simply created an 
HTTPServer and barfed up the ICS data whenever iCal requested it).

For the most part, you can ignore all of the magic unique identifiers.  
  Simply keep them consistent and iCal will do its best to update 
records (as opposed to creating new records).

Export/import is considerably easier, but less featureful, than 
syncronization.  The syncro APIs/protocol is all private at this point. 
  It is not *that* hard to reverse engineer and you can actually load 
the various conduits into Python via PyObjC at the command line as a 
sort of test bench.

But, no, none of this is documented.  When Apple makes the API 
available, you can rest assured that PyObjC will support it...

b.bum