ical and outlook
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.