Date iCal

Last updated April 12, 2013. Created by coredumperror on January 15, 2013.
Edited by LeeHunter, lundj. Log in to edit this page.

Installation

Date iCal has several required dependencies, and an optional one:

• The Views, Entity API, Libraries API (version 2.0), and Date modules are required.
• The iCalcreator library is required.
• PHP 5.3 is required by the iCalcreator library to properly handle timezone data. Date iCal *might* work with PHP 5.2, but that configuration is untested and unsupported.
• The Feeds module is needed to enable import of iCal feeds from other sites, but if you don't plan to import external calendars, you don't need to install it.

To install the iCalcreator library, download it from here and extract the zip file. Inside that file you'll find iCalcreator.class.php. Copy that file to a folder in your Drupal site named "sites/all/libraries/iCalcreator".
Then clear the cache on your site, by using either drush cc all or logging in to your site and navigating to admin/config/development/performance to click the "Clear all caches" button. This is necessary because libraries are cached, and you may see confusing behavior if the iCalcreator library gets cached at a bad time.

To confirm that iCalcreator is installed correctly, log in to your site
and navigate to the admin/reports/status page. If the row titled "Date iCal" is
green, Date iCal is ready to go. If it's red, the iCalcreator library is not
properly installed. If it's missing, you'll need to enable Date iCal on the Modules page.

How to create an iCal page

1. Go to the Manage Display page for the entity you want to export in an iCal feed. You will see that there is a new view mode for all entities, called 'iCal'.
2. Set up the iCal view mode to contain whatever should be exported as the 'Description' field for the iCal feed. You can trim the text to the desired size, include additional information from other fields, etc.
3. Create a new view that displays the entities that you want to include in the iCal feed.
4. Add a "Feed" to the view. Change the format to 'iCal Feed'. When you click Apply from that dialog, you'll be given the option to name the calendar. This name will appear in your users' calendar clients as the calendar's title.
5. Change the Show setting to 'iCal Entity' (rather than 'Content' or 'Fields').
6. In the settings for iCal Entity, select the date field that should be used as the event date for the iCal feed. Make sure that you choose a field that is a part of every entity that your View displays. Otherwise, the entities which don't have that field will be left out of the iCal feed.
7. You may optionally choose a field that will be used to populate the Location property of events in your iCal feed. This field can be either a text field or a node reference field, in which case the title of the node will be used.
8. Give the feed a path like 'calendar/%/export.ics', where you have a '/%/' for every contextual filter in the view.
9. Attach the feed to a page view.
10. Make sure the Pager options are set to "Display all items".
11. Add date filters or arguments that will constrain the view to the items you want to be included in the iCal feed.
12. Navigate to the page view. You should see the iCal icon at the bottom of the view. If you click on the icon it will download an .ics file with the events that matched the view criteria.

How to import an iCal feed from another site

1. Install the Feeds module, which acts as the framework around Date iCal's calendar import functionality.
2. Log in to your Drupal site and navigate to the admin/structure/feeds page.
3. Click the "Add importer" link, and give it a name and description.
4. Clicking "Create" will bring you to the general Feeds importer settings page. This page displays some general information about making Feeds importers, which you should familiarize yourself with.
5. In the left sidebar, you'll see "Basic settings", "Fetcher", "Parser", and "Processor". The Parser and Processor settings are what we're interested in. In the Parser section, click "change". This will bring up the Parser selection page, where you should select the radio button for "iCal Parser" and then click Save.
6. Under Processor, click the "Settings" link. Most of the time, you'll want to use the "Update existing nodes (slower than replacing them)" setting. Then select the Content type of the nodes you'd like to create from iCal events. You can leave the other settings as their defeaults, or change them as you need.
7. Click Save.
8. Cick the "Mapping" link at the bottom of the left sidebar. This page is where you'll define how iCal event properties get mapped into your nodes' fields. Expand the "Legend" for a detailed description of each source and target field. Sources are the attributes available in iCal event objects. Targets are the fields in your nodes.

Most of this setup is going to be dependant upon how your content type's fields are configured, but there are some universal requirements:
1) You must map the "UID" source to the "GUID" target. Then, after clicking "Add", click the gear-shaped button that appears in the new table row, and check the "Unique" checkbox. Then click "Update", and then before you add any more mappings, click "Save" at the bottom of the page.
2) If you're going to map both the "Date start" and "Date end" sources, you MUST ensure that the "Date start" mapping is above the "Date end" mapping in the table. This is because of an implementation detail in the parser.
3) It's a good idea to map the "Summary" source to the "Title" target, and the "Description" source to whatever field is the "body" of the node.

9. Once you've completed all the mappings, click the "Save" button on the bottom left side of the page.
10. Now you can import the iCal feed into nodes by going to the /import page of your site (e.g. http://www.exmaple.com/import). Click the link for the importer you just created, and enter the URL of the feed you'd like to import into the "URL" field. Click the "Import" button, and observe the progress.

Once it's done, you should see a green message saying "Created X nodes." If you do, you've successfully set up your iCal importer. If you get some other message, you'll need to tweak the importer's settings.

Known issues

If the DESCRIPTION field is missing from your iCal feed's events, and your site is using Organic Groups, you may be experiencing a permissions issue. Please visit this link for a potential solution.