[kronolith] Calendar Export Issues (timezones and alarms)

[Frank Domina]

Does anyone know if it is a known problem that 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.

- Regards,
- Frank Domina 




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