[Tickets #4851] Calendar export issues (alarms & timezone)

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Ticket URL: http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/?id=4851
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 Ticket             | 4851
 Created By         | junkmail at dominaweb.net
 Summary            | Calendar export issues (alarms & timezone)
 Queue              | Kronolith
 Version            | 2.1.2
 Type               | Bug
 State              | Unconfirmed
 Priority           | 2. Medium
 Owners             | 
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junkmail at dominaweb.net (2007-01-08 13:23) wrote:

The export format (.ics) is failing to encode the user's timezone.  The
result, when pulling into Outllook, for example, is that all of the times
are off by the difference between UTC and the user's timezone.

It's also not properly setting the reminder alarm (for Outlook, cell phone
calendar, whatever).  It is using an "AALARM" tag, which I don't even see
in the RFC for the ics format.

Below are changes I manually made to the file before importing into
Outlook, and it corrected the issues.  It would be great if these fixes
could be incorporated into Kronolith itself!

ISSUE 1) Regarding the timezone (obviously needs to change to match the
exporting user's timezone).....also, note that I set the DST switch to the
NEW (as of 2007) dates.  I made the file START as follows (asterisks on
inserted lines for readibility in this email, but the asterisks are NOT in
the file):
     *  BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
        BEGIN:VCALENDAR
        VERSION:2.0
        PRODID:-//The Horde Project//Horde_iCalendar Library//EN
        METHOD:PUBLISH
     *  TZID:US-Eastern
     *  LAST-MODIFIED:20070101T000000Z
     *  TZURL:http://zones.stds_r_us.net/tz/US-Eastern
     *  BEGIN:STANDARD
     *  DTSTART:19671029T020000
     *  RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=1SU;BYMONTH=11
     *  TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
     *  TZOFFSETTO:-0500
     *  TZNAME:EST
     *  END:STANDARD
     *  BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
     *  DTSTART:19870405T020000
     *  RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=2SU;BYMONTH=3
     *  TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
     *  TZOFFSETTO:-0400
     *  TZNAME:EDT
     *  END:DAYLIGHT
        --- Then, EVENTS (starting with the first BEGIN:VEVENT) GO
HERE---
And then, finally,  it ends with:
    END:VCALENDAR
     * END:VTIMEZONE

Related, I needed to modify each event to specify the timezone for the
start/end times.  For example:
    DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20070120
    DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20070121
needed to become:
    DTSTART;TZID=US-Eastern:20070120
    DTEND;TZID=US-Eastern:20070121
(Note, there is no time, just a date,  because the event was an all-day
event, but the same resolution applies to shorter events.)

ISSUE #2) Regarding the reminder alarms, I left the "AALARM" tags as-is
(they didn't seem to hurt anything -- probably ignored), but for each
event I added the proper alarm tags (I inserted these immediately below
the AALARM tag:
    BEGIN:VALARM
    TRIGGER:-PT12H
    ACTION:AUDIO
    END:VALARM

The TRIGGER above specifies 12 hours before the event starts.  If you
wanted 15 minutes, it would be TRIGGER:-PT-15M, and so on.

The ACTION:AUDIO appears to work fine to tell Outlook to pop-up its
reminder dialog, and in within my phone, signal the reminder with a beep.