<< Back to Cooper Events Help with the Calendar Adding and overriding an event Updating a calendar from a 3rd party application Importing events Using Apple iCal with Thyme Adding and overriding an event Bob is a manager at a branch office. He has set up Thyme for him and his team to use so that they may coordinate meetings and deadlines. Every week Bob and his team have a conference call on Monday at 10am. He must now create the event. He logs into Thyme and clicks on the Month tab. From there he clicks on the 'Add' link for the next Monday to come. The title of this event is 'Team Conference Call' This is of the event type 'Call' The call starts at 10am and usually lasts about an hour This call will repeat every week and not end in the foreseeable future Bob clicks 'Save' and can now see his meeting in the calendar A few weeks later, Bob's boss has scheduled a meeting with him next month on a Monday at 10am. Bob now has to change his team meeting call. Not knowing how long the meeting with his boss will last, he decides to move his team call for that week to Tuesday. He navigates to the date and clicks on the event to view it. Then clicks the 'Edit' button. He selects 'This date only' as he only wants to change the date of this meeting in particular. He sets the date one day ahead so that it happens on Tuesday and clicks 'Save' He then realizes his team may not notice the change. Bob edits the event for that date again. He clicks on 'Flag This Event' so that it will be more noticeable to his team members. Bob clicks 'Save' again and sees his meeting is now flagged. Should Bob's boss cancel their meeting, Bob could reset that instance of the event to it's original state

Updating a calendar from a 3rd party application Thyme has remote access capabilities that allow it to be subscribed and updated from any 3rd party application that supports this feature such as Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, and Windates. In this example, we'll use Mozilla Sunbird and subscribe to and update the Chess Club calendar. This is the same calendar used in the integration tutorial, http://www.extrosoft.com/extrovert/tutorials/examples/chess_club/index.php. To enable remote access for a calendar, navigate to calendar administration and click on the Edit button next to the calendar you wish to enable remote access for. Select the Remote Access tab and check the Enable remote access checkbox. Note the iCalendar and Webcal link displayed at the bottom. Copy the iCalendar link (some applications require a Webcal link). Open up your calendar application's configuration which allows you to subscribe to remote calendars. Paste the URL copied in the previous step, enter a name for the calendar and click OK. Note that in our example, we've chosen to automatically publish changes. Our calendar application then updates to reflect the same events seen in the Chess Club calendar. Chess Club Site Sunbird Adding an event to either Thyme or Sunbird will be reflected in both. We'll add an event to Sunbird announcing a Fall chess camp that will last from August 8th - 12th. Now that it is added to the local calendar, Sunbird will automatically publish these changes to Thyme. Since only the accounts specified in the Chess Club calendar's members list as having write or admin access may write to the calendar, you are prompted for a user name and password. Remote access for a calendar goes by the same rules as accessing it through Thyme's web interface. If the group Public were not given view access to the Chess Club calendar, you would have been prompted for a user name and password to view/subscribe to it. Sunbird has published the changes and our Chess Camp now appears on our Chess Club site's calendar. Remote calendar subscription is an easy way to use your 2nd favorite calendar application to update Thyme. This will update any calendar you have enabled remote access for. Whether embedded in a web site (like our example) or not.

Importing events Thyme can import calendars in CSV or iCalendar format. CSV is a general format used by most applications as a default. It is generally used as a last resort as it can not hold event repeat structures or other complex information. Thyme can also import iCalendar files. This calendar format is quickly becoming the standard for calendar applications, but we won't bore you with technical mumbo-jumbo. The important thing is you can download calendars from around the internet that include your favorite TV show schedule or favorite band's tour dates! Sites such as iCal Share and iCal World offer a vast library of calendars for topics ranging from sports team schedules and holidays to "today in history." For our example we'll download a calendar from iCal Share called Eclipse Calendar. Click on the Download calendar link and save the resulting file to your computer. In Thyme, select the calendar you wish to import to from the calendar picker located in the nav bar. You may wish to create a new calendar in Thyme to import your events into. Next, click on the sync link located at Thyme's footer. At the Sync screen, under the Import section, you may select options for this sync operation. If the calendar you are importing to has multiple categories, you will be presented with an Import To Category option. Using this, you may easily categorize all of the incoming events. You may wish to create a new category to import these events into before importing the file. The Locale option allows you to select timezone and dst settings. Autodetect will try to detect which locale settings the events have. Most iCalendar files contain embedded timezone information, so this option usually works well. None specifies that imported events will have no timezone information. Anyone viewing the event will see it as occuring at the same time no matter which timezone they are in. Force allows you to force a timezone setting for all of the imported events. The If Duplicates Are Found option allows you to dictate the Sync operation's behaviour if an imported event matches an event that is already found in Thyme. The Ignore Duplicates setting will try to detect which event is newer, and ignore the incoming event if the one in the target calendar is more recent. Most iCalendar events contain version or last-modified information, so this option usually works well. The Overwrite existing event setting will overwrite the event in Thyme with any matching imported event. The Create new event setting will create new events from each imported event regardless of whether or not a match is found. The If Duplicates Are Found setting is subject to a calendar's permissions and event security. If the strict event security option is enabled on the calendar, overwriting existing events owned by another user follows the same rules as editing events owned by another user. In the case that the sync operation tries to overwrite or update an event that you do not have permission to edit, it will simply skip over that event and the sync will continue. Calendar administrators, super users, and the calendar owner will also be presented with a Full Sync option. This option will allow you to perform a full sync operation, where the calendar will match the imported file exactly. If an event exists in the target calendar that does not exist in the import file, the event will be removed from the calendar. This may seem like a lot to swallow but, options, left to their default settings, are usually fine. So now the fun part! Click on the Browse button (text of this button may differ based in your web browser software), and select the iCalendar file we had downloaded. Click on the Import button to import the events into Thyme. The resulting events have been imported into Thyme and can be manipulated, syndicated, publsihed, etc.. just as any other events.

Using Apple iCal with Thyme iCal is the default calendar application that comes with Mac OSX. It has the ability to both subscribe to and publish Thyme's calendars just as if using a WebDav server (don't worry if you don't know what this means). To subscribe to a calendar, navigate to Thyme in a web browser and click on the details link under the calendar's title. The calendar's details window will open up where you may click on the link next to Webcal. Apple iCal will automatically start if it is not already running and ask you to confirm that you wish to subscribe to this calendar. Clicking on Subscribe will allow you to edit the subscription details for this calendar. The default title will be automatically populated by Thyme depending on which calendar you are subscribing to. Once you click OK, the calendar you subscribed to will be listed in iCal's calendar list, allowing you to view it just as you would a local calendar. Publishing a calendar to Thyme from iCal works a little differently than most other calendar applications. iCal can not sync with a remote calendar. That is .. you may either subscribe to a calendar or publish to it, you may not do both. When iCal publishes a calendar, rather than downloading the current calendar and merging the events, it deletes all the events in the remote calendar before publishing local events. After the upload, it will not download the calendar again to see the current content. Some users have suggested reading the discussion located at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050414182034814 for a solution to the iCal problem. You may choose to publish to an existing calendar or create a new one. If you choose to publish to an existing calendar, be aware that, as previously explained, iCal will delete all of the events currently in the target Thyme calendar when it performs the publish operation. To get around this, you may export all of the events in iCalendar format (click on Sync in Thyme's footer), then import them into iCal before publishing. If you choose to create a new calendar that is updated exclusively by iCal, you do not need to worry about existing events. To publish to a Thyme calendar using iCal, navigate to Thyme in a web browser and click on the details link under the calendar's title. In the calendar's details window, copy the link location next to iCalendar. Next, start iCal and highlight the calendar you wish to publish. Select Calendar from the top menu bar, then cilck on the Publish... menu item. The publish calendar window will open allowing you to enter details for the publish operation. Publish calendar as has no effect on Thyme as the calendar's title was already set when you created the calendar in Thyme. Publish on should be changed from .Mac to a Private Server (In some versions of iCal, this will read WebDav Server instead). In Base URL is where you should paste the url copied from the calendar's details window. Typically, a calendar's access is set up so that only certain accounts may update it. In the Login and Password boxes, you must enter your Thyme login information in order to update this calendar. Once you click the Publish button, this calendar is published to Thyme. This is indicated in iCal in it's list of calendars. If this calendar is updated in Thyme (adding or updating events), the next time iCal publishes this calendar, those modifications will be erased or overwritten to exactly match the calendar in iCal.