Hello everyone,
as mentioned during the last call I recently worked on syncing Webcal calendars.
For those who don’t know, these are external calendars to your CalDAV account that you can subscribe to in order to display their associated events in your calendar.
Some examples of subscription sources: Calendrier des jours fériés — Thunderbird https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/?format=ics
it can be the list of public holidays of your country, school calendar dates, the schedule of your favorite team’s matches… it opens up quite a few possibilities with scenes
Subscription URLs point to .ics files containing events; these files are fully managed by third-party organizations. Until now, to get them into Gladys you had to download the file, import it into a calendar on your CalDAV service (Apple, Nextcloud…) and sync. The problem is that if an event was modified/added you had to re-download that file to update the data. With this development, you will be able to subscribe to the third-party organization’s calendar (by using the URL that points to the file to subscribe instead of downloading it) on your CalDAV account and the subscription will be reflected in Gladys.
Because the process is heavier than a classic CalDAV calendar synchronization (no incremental sync), syncing these calendars is disabled by default (can be enabled from the Synchronization menu of the CalDAV integration) and performed every 12 hours (in terms of display this should not affect you much because generally these calendars do not change often since they are public calendars e.g.: public holidays are known in advance and don’t change, competition match schedules are not updated often… and you can always manually force Synchronization with the Synchronize button in the integration, particularly useful the first time)
For those who want to test, a dev image is available on docker bertrandda/gladys:caldav
In this update I also added synchronization of event descriptions and their use in scenes.
In a future version I’d like to allow users to subscribe to Webcal calendars directly in Gladys. That way those who don’t yet have a CalDAV calendar account or don’t need one will still be able to add public calendars to their Gladys calendar and have data to use.
Feel free to share any feedback.