How about you support the standard, m'kay?

’ve been working on some vCard/vCalendar export code at work for the past couple of days, the main purpose being to import the resulting vCard/vCalendar files into Outlook.  The problem being that Outlook doesn’t have any decent support for the vCalendar spec.

First gripe: The vCalendar spec outlines 2 types of “calendar entities”: vEvent and vTodo.  vEvent support is so-so and Outlook doesn’t support vTodo at all.  :(

Gripe the 2nd: A vCalendar file is pretty much an envelope around vEvents.  This would allow you to create multiple vEvents and vTodos and wrap them up in a single file for import.  If Outlook is presented with a vCalendar file that contains multiple vEvents it grabs the first one and ignores the rest.

Gripe C: Parameter support. Frankly it kind of stinks. The following vCalendar parameters are things that:

a.) Are supported, but the results are different from what is outlined in the spec.

OR

b.) Are not supported, the spec does not require that it be supported but Outlook has functionality that could support it.

Group A:

PRIORITY: The parameter is defined as 1 being highest priority, 2 being second highest priority and so on with 0 (zero) being undefined.  Outlook decided that greater than 0 is High priority, 0 is Normal priority, and less than 0 is Low priority.  The spec doesn’t even outline negative numbers, since you’re not supposed to use them!  According to the spec, the lower the number the higher the priority.  According to Outlook, the lower the number the lower the priority.  Complete opposite.

CLASS: This parameter supports the following properties: PUBLIC, PRIVATE, CONFIDENTIAL.  The strange thing is when you set it CONFIDENTIAL, Outlook changes the sensitivity of the event, but doesn’t mark it as private.  Maybe I’m alone on this one, but if something is confidential it sure as hell is private!

Group B:

DALARM: This parameter lets you specify when you should be alerted about a calendar event.  Outlook ignores this one entirely, but the spec does say that adherence is optional.  Since Outlook does have an option to remind the user about an event, I figured that they would have some rudimentary support for this.

TRANSP: Supposedly, setting this to 0 means that the event will show time as “Free”.  Outlook ignores this one.  The spec even goes as far to let the application interpret the number however it wants (unlike the PRIORITY field, which Outlook freely redefines).