Falling Dominos

Creating ICS (iCalendar) files can be handy especially in environments where Lotus Notes is not the main email/scheduling system. There are many ways to create the ICS file but it has to maintain this format. Ellie Harmon wrote a sample and description of the format here.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:
DTSTART:
DTEND:
LOCATION:
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SEQUENCE:0
UID:
DTSTAMP:
DESCRIPTION:
SUMMARY:
PRIORITY:5
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1
CLASS:PUBLIC
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT15M
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:Reminder
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR 

The one trick with Lotus Notes is the date formats. Use this script to format your dates:

Call parentDoc.AppendItemValue( "icsStartDate", Format(item.DateTimeValue.LSGMTTime, "yyyymmdd\Thhmmss\Z")) 

If you don’t need a time, replace “hhmmss” with “000000.”"

In once scenario… I allowed users to download an ICS based on a document they were viewing on the web. If you want to try that… print this code as the first line of your agent:

Print |Content-Type:text/calendar| &Chr(13) & Chr(10)| 

One Response so far | Have Your Say!

1. 

   Jaime Bisgrove
   January 8th, 2008 at 11:09 am #

   Nice work Tom !