[Ietf-caldav] vCalender 1.0 component possible as return type?

[Cyrus Daboo]

Hi Alexander,

--On June 21, 2006 10:52:44 AM +0200 Alexander Traud 
<alexander.traud at macnews.de> wrote:

> In reply to:
>> http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/ietf-caldav/2005-May/000376.html
>
> I hope I understand this correctly, please correct me if I am wrong:
>
> - There is no requirement forcing a CalDAV client to understand or send
> iCalendar components. A CalDAV client can use for example vCalendar 1.0 or
> xCal or whatever as exchange format as long as the client states this in
> in Accept HTTP headers, of course. Nevertheless, if that succeeds,
> depends on the server.

Section 5.2.4 of the draft describes the CALDAV:supported-calendar-data. 
That is used by the server to advertise what types of calendar data it 
supports. In the absence of that property the server ONLY supports 
text/calendar VERSION:2.0. So a good client wanting to store calendar data 
in some other format will first check what is supported by the server and 
then only use a format that is known to be supported.

In theory a server could advertise:

         <C:supported-calendar-data
            xmlns:C="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:caldav">
           <C:calendar-data content-type="text/calendar" version="1.0"/>
         </C:supported-calendar-data>

Which would mean it ONLY supported vCalendar. However, section 2 states 
that iCalendar MUST be supported - so there is a little discrepancy there - 
I will look into fixing that.

> - There is no requirement forcing a CalDAV server to alter a received
> vCalendar 1.0 component to iCalendar (on PUT or any other method) except a
> non-vCalendar aware client asks for the component. So a PUT with a
> vCalendar might be saved 1:1 by the server.

Correct - nothing forces a server to return calendar data in a format other 
than what was used to store it, but nothing prevents a server from doing 
that either.

Question: do you really have a need to still use vCalendar as opposed to 
iCalendar? If so, what is keeping you from upgrading?

-- 
Cyrus Daboo