[Cosmo-dev] New user, perplexed: CalDAV interface with Cosmo

[Mikeal Rogers]

Out main developer is on vacation for a few days so I'll try to  
answer as much of your questions as I can.

-Mikeal

On May 26, 2006, at 11:37 AM, Don Levey wrote:

> I'm a new user of Cosmo, and not much of a programmer, so please  
> bear with
> me.  First, I want to explain my goal, in case I'm on the wrong  
> track and/or
> someone has other suggestions.
>
> I have a small home network.  I want to maintain a centralised family
> calendar so that we can look in one place for scheduled commitments  
> for me,
> my wife, and my kids.  I am trying to standardise on Evolution as a  
> client,
> as it seems to have what I need (*and* be free from MS).  Ideally,  
> I'd like
> us all to access the same calendar and server, and make our individual
> changes centrally.  Someone suggested Cosmo and CalDAV; from what  
> I've read
> this seems like the correct solution.

We've been working with some of the evolution developers on interop  
issues between evolution and cosmo. I can't remember the status of  
this, Brian will have to comment on it when he gets back. Evolution  
added CalDAV support recently so they may not be supporting the  
entire spec just yet.

>
> Unfortunately, I can't seem to get the interface going.  I have  
> installed
> the OSAF bundle (0.3) and am able to login as root, and to create user
> accounts and login.  I'm creating a 'shared' user for the purpose  
> of the
> shared calendar.  I have noticed a few problems:
>
> * Setting the URL in Evolution as caldav://FQDN:port/cosmo/home/shared
> doesn't allow me to enter/view anything (but then there's nothing  
> to view
> yet).  Specifying a filename at the end of that URL doesn't seem to  
> help.
> What I seem to get in the access.log are 401, 409 and 411 errors.

This may be somewhere that we either haven't finished Evolution  
interop, or Evolution doesn't fully support MKCALENDAR yet.

My suggestion would be to download our experimentally usable desktop  
client, chandler (http://chandler.osafoundation.org/), add a "Sharing  
Account" that points to your server and share one calendar, even if  
it's empty. Then use the calendar resource URL (it should be cosmo/ 
home/user/calendarName/ , you can check the cosmo log to make sure)  
in Evolution.

>
> * I thought perhaps I needed to create a base calendar, so I tried  
> to login
> to Scooby.  However, I cannot.  When I enter my (valid, works in  
> Cosmo) ID I
> just get presented with the login page again.  Looking in the log,  
> I seem to
> have invoked the loginfailed.js script, but nothing else seems to  
> happen.

There are two bundles, one with Scooby0.1-release and one with  
Scooby0.2-trunk, although we are very proud of scooby 0.2, it's very  
pretty :), it isn't released yet and hasn't gone through a QA cycle.

You might also wanna try disabling your browser cache, I've found  
that quite helpful with these login issues previously.

Although I would use Chandler to create the calendar instead of  
scooby, see below.

>
> * The person who recommended Cosmo to me said that I should see a  
> Scooby
> object when browsing the home directory via the web interface.   
> However, I
> do not - just a directory empty of files and tickets.

Yes, scooby does a mkcalendar. But scooby is still in 0.2 and doesn't  
fully support a lot of important things, like recurring events. In  
0.1 we made sure that scooby created it's own calendar and wouldn't  
mess with calendars created by other clients. If you create the  
calendar with scooby, edit it and create some untested unsupported  
events, then look at it again with scooby you may end up doing  
something you didn't want to do to your calendar data.

Scooby 0.2 release should fix this.

>
> What have I done wrong?  Thanks in advance,

So hopefully creating the calendar with Chandler and then editing it  
via CalDAV with evolution works for you. If it doesn't one  
alternative is you can edit the calendar with Chandler and view it in  
other clients.

In 0.3 we added a nifty little feature. Since CalDAV doesn't specify  
a behavior when doing a GET request on a calendar resource we  
implemented a webcal response when doing this.

If you want a read only webcal that you can view in iCal (and I think  
Evolution although I haven't tried it) you could use this feature.

>  -Don Levey
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