I want to offer an Add to Calendar button for individual events on my site.

I have set up an iCal Feed using views, I have excluded the iCal Calendar Name, however when I click the add link, my Google Calendar prompts to either add the feed as a separate calendar or not at all. As you can imagine generating an entire calendar for just 1 event isn't particularly useful.

I know it says under the exclude iCal Name that this will prompt "some" clients to use an existing calendar, I just wanted to verify that this is the same behavior everyone is experiencing with Google Calendar or am I missing some additional configuration step.

Thank you for the great module!

Rich

Comments

coredumperror’s picture

coredumperror CreditAttribution: coredumperror commented

I get this same behavior, and unfortunately I have no idea how to make Google Calendar add an iCal feed to an existing calendar. The only client I've used that can do this is OSX's Calendar app (formerly called iCal).

coredumperror’s picture

coredumperror CreditAttribution: coredumperror commented
Status: Active » Postponed

I've asked on the Google Calendar group about whether this is possible.

The only way I've found to add an iCal feed to an existing Google Calendar is to download the .ics file, then upload it to google using the "Import calendar" function. Unfortunately, this will not keep your Google Calendar up-to-date with the latest changes from the site that's hosting the iCal feed.

malcomio’s picture

malcomio CreditAttribution: malcomio commented

For individual events, the Add to Cal module will help you.

For a feed of events, there's more information here: https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/3033040

It should be possible to provide this in the theme layer, or to patch the module to offer the link.

coredumperror’s picture

coredumperror CreditAttribution: coredumperror commented

I'm not really sure how that Google Calendar feature you linked actually does, well... anything. I tried it out, and the HTML it gives is just a link to my calendar. I can't figure out how to use it to add anything to my calendar.

I think it might be for sharing events from your Google Calendar with other people, as opposed to adding new events to your own calendar.

malcomio’s picture

malcomio CreditAttribution: malcomio commented

Sorry, got a bit confused by the reply in #2, which seems to be related to #384614: iCal, Google Calendar, "Add Url"

Also, should have read the Google page more closely.

As you say, the behaviour described is the default for adding a feed to Google.

It is possible to construct a URL to avoid the intermediate step of downloading the ics file:

https://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http://d7.rubydesign.co.uk/ev...

coredumperror’s picture

coredumperror CreditAttribution: coredumperror commented

Oh, now I see what that you meant by using that page. The instructions on the page tell you to input a Google Calendar URL into that text field, which made me think it was pretty useless, since it'd just add one Google Calendar to another one. But you can put any URL there, in order to convert that URL to an "Add to Google Calendar" link.

You're right that offering a link like this, in addition to (or in place of) the usual orange iCal link, would be a good idea. I've created #2014847: Offer "Add to my Google Calendar" link to add this feature to our ToDo list.

However, after testing this feature of Google Calendar, it doesn't actually solve the problem in this issue, which is about adding an iCal feed's events to an existing calendar.

coredumperror’s picture

coredumperror CreditAttribution: coredumperror commented
Status: Postponed » Closed (won't fix)

After further research, I've discovered that google simply doesn't support the concept of adding the contents of an iCal feed to an existing calendar, except through their manual file upload process. I tried coming up with some way to emulate their file upload mechanism, but I wasn't successful.

However, I did find a way to add a single event to an existing calendar, but it's Google-specific and doesn't use iCal, so I don't really think it's in scope for Date iCal. Add to Cal appears to already support this type of export, so I'd suggest using that.