I got to talking to Brian Suda about why his hCalendar extracting application x2v works like a dream with iCal but doesn’t seem to work with Microsoft Outlook 2002.
vCalendar/iCalendar Import failed. The input file may be corrupt.
Here’s the event that Outlook doesn’t like, but iCal does:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//suda.co.uk//X2V 0.6.7 (BETA)//EN X-ORIGINAL-URL: http://www.code4lib.org/ VERSION:2.0 BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en:The Portland Jazz Festival DTSTART:20060217 DTEND:20060219 URL:http://www.travelportland.com/jazz/index.html END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR
After quite a bit of experimentation we determined that Outlook demands that the METHOD, UID and DTSTAMP fields be defined.
BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//suda.co.uk//X2V 0.6.7 (BETA)//EN X-ORIGINAL-URL: http://www.code4lib.org/ VERSION:2.0 METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT UID:<abc123> DTSTAMP:20060119T184157Z SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en:The Portland Jazz Festival DTSTART:20060217 DTEND:20060219 URL:http://www.travelportland.com/jazz/index.html END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR
Just thought I’d mention it in here in case someone ends up googling for that error. Brian said he’s going to look into providing this support for those of us who have Microsoft Outlook inflicted on us.
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8 Comments
What a great coincidence that I was bugging Brian about the same thing! I’m glad you found the culprit. And here I was afraid I’d have to contact our help desk to have Outlook patched… (phew).
Do not get me started with the vCard, vCalendar, …
I am so annoyed in the differences, it makes me ill.
Because mac’s iCal is a great GUI and because Firefoxs Calandar allows edits on DAV server, I stick with this format. M$ is just wrong.
You may want to check out the UPDATED lifelint parser. I’ve added support for Outlook.
http://lifelint.net/
Thanks for posting this, it did save me the pain! :)
Thank you – very helpful info – was struggling with Outlook’s useless error message and incompatibility.
Lifesaver! frustration central over here before reading this – Thanks!
Argh! I’ve tried the iCalendar gem and I’m getting nowhere on the ability to get .ics or .vcs files into Outlook. This is the
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
METHOD:PUBLIC
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
PRODID:iCalendar-Ruby
BEGIN:VEVENT
PRIORITY:5
CLASS:PUBLIC
URL:http://finance.yahoo.com
UID:2007-05-04T16:54:13-0700_110934668@mo1.local
DESCRIPTION:this is the event test description
SUMMARY:This is the Summary
DTSTART:20070412T000000
TRANSP:OPAQUE
DTSTAMP:20070504T165413
SEQ:0
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
I switched from Mozilla Lightning to Outlook, and Outlook refused to import a Lightning-produced calendar.
This web page is the only one returned by a Google search for the exact error message that Outlook gives, so I thought I’d add my two bits here.
All I had to do to get Outlook to import the calendar was add the line “METHOD:PUBLISH” under BEGIN:VCALENDAR.
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