iCalendar woes
I use the lovely Orgmode for managing a lot of my tasks, to do lists, projects and so on. It's really very very good.
When reviewing my tasks etc., I thought it would be nice to see what is in my calendar at the same time. Orgmode's Agenda can do all of that if you have your appointments and so in your Emacs calendar.
Here we are good Microsurfs, and so we use Outlook and Exchange.
Problem 1: Getting my calendar out of Outlook/Exchange.
Our IT folk have configured things so the default is that you can only get Free/Busy information when you share calendars. However, they nicely changed my settings when I explained the reasons for wanting to export all the details of my calendar.
So, I could now download my calendar as an .ics file.
Problem 2: Converting the calendar into an Emacs diary file.
There's lots of advice out there on doing this from Gmail, and I choose the advice from Worg which uses an awk script called ics2cal.awk. This work pretty well, and it showed me that it could be done.
Problem 3: Repeating events are not handled well
This is a limitation of the script. There is a python version that is a little better, but it's still not right.
In searching around I came across the fact that Emacs can, all by itself, import .ics files. Yay! I thought.
Rainer at König von Haunstetten explained how to do it. Yes. I thought. I modified his script and gave it a go. It kind of worked.
Problem 4: Events are on the wrong day.
When I first ran the script, it all worked expect I events seemed to be one day out. Dates for the 6th were appearing on the 5th. Hmmm. Then it stopped working altogether. The script would run without errors. And stuff would appear in the diary file, but not be displayed in my agenda. Most odd.
Now, it's probably important to know that my first tests were on the 6 May 2020. Or as the European's would write it 6 5 2020; whereas the Americans would write 5 6 2020. Ah ah! Whilst the ics file is using ISO formatted dates, my subsequent diary files seems to be using American formatted dates.
I'm English, so I go with the European style; and Emacs is set up that way to. Or is it.
Problem 5: Emacs is not set to be using European dates
WTF. It's a fair cop, I'm using Windows 10 having recently migrated away from FreeBSD (that's a different story). But, for a pile of reasons I don't want to go into here, when I run Emacs in batch-mode, I'm not doing it in plain-old plain-old Windows. No. I'm doing it under WSL2.It's actually a different copy/instance of Emacs with an entirely different .emacs.d Ah, ha. Now, how to persuade Emacs under WSL2 to be all European. In the end I modified the script to include the commands not only to run icalendar-import-file but also to set calendar-date-style to be European. Just like this:
getExchangeCalendar.sh
#!/bin/bash
# customize these
WGET=/usr/bin/wget
ICS2ORG=/mnt/c/Users/psmith/Dropbox/psmith/bin/ical2org.awk
ICSFILE=/mnt/c/Users/psmith/Dropbox/psmith/Temp/calendar.ics
ORGFILE=/mnt/c/Users/psmith/Dropbox/psmith/Org/exchange-diary
URL=http://mail.here.nz/owa/calendar/917ca3e521345fc9fee5@here.it/37a721c9253d46f59f6c420db2ab1/calendar.ics
# no customization needed below
$WGET -O $ICSFILE $URL
# Creat an empty diary file
rm $ORGFILE
#
# Fix/set the timezone from (no TZ description) to Pacific/Auckland
#
sed -i.bak 's/(no TZ description)/Pacific\/Auckland/' $ICSFILE
#
# Now do the import
#
emacs -batch --eval="(progn (setq calendar-date-style 'european) (icalendar-import-file \"$ICSFILE\" \"$ORGFILE\"))"Oh, I mangled the URL of my calendar … I don't want everyone reading it
It all works and I'm a happy camper.