[Dev] Subscribing to calendar URLs

[Morgen Sagen]

On Feb 1, 2006, at 2:06 PM, Grant Baillie wrote:

> On IRC earlier today, we had a user, Leppy, unable to subscribe to  
> his Basecamp calendars (see <http://basecamphq.com/>) from  
> Chandler; both Mozilla and Apple iCal both had no problems.
>
> What's going on here is that Chandler is getting itself confused  
> about what kind of thing you're trying to subscribe to. It could be  
> any of:
>
>   1. A simple text/calendar resource (i.e. a ".ics file on the web").
>   2. A non-CalDAV Chandler WebDAV collection (i.e. cloud xml)
>   3. A CalDAV collection
>
> It turns out that we don't really detect the first case very well;  
> in fact, if you're not subscribing to a URL that ends in ".ics",  
> Chandler won't allow you to subscribe, and will fail with a fairly  
> incomprehensible error.
>
> While I'm working on making this code work better (i.e. correctly)  
> in 0.7, it seemed to me that we could make a simple change in the  
> sharing code for 0.6.1 that would enable more users to subscribe to  
> shared calendars:
>
> Basically, if the URL being subscribed to is using the 'webcal'  
> scheme, we should assume case #1 above. This would fix the user's  
> problem, at least, and others where calendars get shared with a  
> webcal: scheme but no .ics extension.
>
> FWIW, the webcal scheme is not an official standard; rather I think  
> it's something Apple made up, but has become fairly widespread  
> nowadays.
>
> Any comments / suggestions?
>
> --Grant

I'm for using the webcal scheme for detecting case #1; either that or  
adding a checkbox to the subscribe dialog that lets the user indicate  
which case it is.  It gets tough to auto-detect between #1 and #3  
because Cosmo will actually return a monolithic .ics calendar if you  
do a GET on a CalDAV collection (which is actually a cool feature, it  
just makes it hard to auto-detect things).