122649 - (cal-importing) Importing tracking bug (Calendar Requirements Document, section 7)

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[Chris Charabaruk]

This is a tracking bug for Importing, section 6.0 of the Calendar Requirements 
Document.

Comment 1

[Chris Charabaruk]

Bugspam: Adding meta keyword to tracking bugs, something they should have had
from the start. :P

Comment 2

[paul w brown]

may I suggest/request that importing include both Palm Desktop & Netscape
Calendar importing/export ... 

Comment 3

[Mike Potter]

Tracking bug. Sorry for the spam.

Comment 4

[ajbu]

part of this is done in bug 146212, now in CVS. Enables import of data in 
iCalendar format.

Comment 5

[Martin]

A full integrated synchronization between Calendar and Outlook/Exchange or Lotus
Notes should be possible!!!

Comment 6

[Charles Simon]

For additional import/export: sync'ing calendar data with Palm OS's Date Book
would be a must in my book.

Comment 7

[alge]

suggest this depends on bug 158510

Comment 8

[alge]

(if somebody comfirms bug 158510 that is)

Comment 9

[Neeme Praks]

On requirements page, it is written that "You should be able to import MS
Outlook and other popular calendar data. COMPLETE"

However, after installing the Calendar version "Mozilla Calendar
2002090516-cal", I couldn't find the Outlook import feature from anywhere...

Comment 10

[Brant Gurganus]

Default QA Contact for Calendar has changed.  If you wish to remain the QA
contact for this bug, feel free to change it back.

Comment 11

[Aleksander Adamowski]

nominating bug 176730, "Palm Todo list sync".

Comment 12

[Chris Sims]

I keep several years of back events on my calendar, I imported the calendar from
a Palm OS device via the kde palm synch utility, then imported the resulting
ical file to Calendar.  This works, but the many hundreds of old events all set
off alarms.  It took a *long* time for each event to create its window and the
"acknowledge all alarms" button finally to become visible and usable.  Also, the
first time I tried to import I inadvertently enabled viewing each imported
event, which was impossible, and there appeared to be no way to exit the program
without logging out.  

(This is all under Redhat 9.)

Comment 13

[Mostafa Hosseini]

There is an option to turn off notification for missed alarms and there is also
an option to suppress the alarm dialog box ( See Preferences->Calendar->Alarms
). It is a good idea to turn alarms off when importing. Now this can be
suggested to the user in a popup dialog when they are about to import events.

Comment 14

[Charles Simon]

The default behavior for importing should be to ignore alarms for events that 
that have passed.  If you want to get fancy you could pop up a dialog that allow
the user to enter a number of days old an event must be for its alarm to be
ignored.  The suggested default value is 1 day.

Comment 15

[alexis]

Attachment: PalmDesktop vCal event which does not import correctly

The attached file, "eventFromPalm.vcs," is a vCal event compliant with
vCal/iCal version 1.0, which does not import correctly into Mozilla in two
respects:

First, Mozilla ignores the specified character encoding for the "DESCRIPTION"
property, so it doesn't translate the encoded newlines correctly. Second,
despite the file's 1.0 version declaration, Mozilla applies vCal version 2.0
encoding rules to the "SUMMARY" property, so it disallowed the comma character,
which should be allowed.

Comment 16

[alexis]

This is a fuller comment on Moz's non-compliance with iCal 1.0. This is 
illustrated in its inability to correctly import vCal events from Palm Desktop, 
which I demonstrate in my testcase attachment #142662 [details]. I've done some research 
into the nitty-gritty here, so I thought I'd share it.

iCal 1.0 (AKA, vCal) was laid out in the a versit consortium specification (I'm 
hosting a copy at http://www.alexisgallagher.files/eventgenie/vcal-10.txt). iCal 
2.0 -- which extends it, most notably with free-busy declarations -- was laid 
out in RFC 2445 (http://www.alexisgallagher.files/eventgenie/rfc2445.txt).

Compliance with iCal 2.0 ensures almost, but not quite, complete backward 
compatibility with iCal 1.0. Right now, unfortunately, Moz is compliant with 2.0 
but not 1.0. But I would like to urge the MozCalendar team to support iCal 1.0, 
since the difference is quote small, since iCal 1.0 is supported by Palm 
Desktop, and is the most widely support common denominator format for 
standards-based event sharing.

To my knowledge, the only area of divergence is in encoding of text property 
values. For instance, iCal 2.0 specification, in section 4.3.11, specifies that 
text newlines should be encoded as \n's, and that commas, quotation marks, 
semicolons, and other characters should be escaped with a backslash (e.g., \, 
for a comma). However, iCal 1.0, in section 2.1.4 and 2.1.5 (Encondings & 
Character set), only specifies ASCII and and does not require such escaping. The 
consequences is that Moz clobbers punctuation and truncates titles when 
importing vCal1.0 events.

Furthermore, iCal 1.0 lists and uses "quoted-printable" as a possible encoding, 
a recommendation which is implemented in the Palm Desktop 4.1's export behavior. 
(I am not aware if "quoted-printable" is officially an "IANA registered 
iCalendar encoding type" for the iCal specification, which would also make it 
required for the iCal2.0 spec.) But as MozCal ignores this encoding parameter, 
the consequence is that descriptions with newlines, tabs, or other extended 
characters are rendered into gobbledygook.

I think MozCal should lead the way in standards-compliance, and extending 
backward standard-compatibility to widely supported PIM packages like Palm 
Desktop would be a great step.

Comment 17

[Xanthor Sccas]

Mozilla calendar has the possibility to export events with the RDFiCal format
(http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/).
But I didn't find how importing such files.
Could it be possible ? Should I open another bug and ask it as a feature ?

Comment 18

[Michael J Kolb]

Attachment: Calendar can't read dates in this file.

This is a VCS file output by the site MyFBO.com. Sunbird (Mozilla Calendar) is
able to import the text fields, but not the datetime fields. They initialize to
today 12am. May be an issue reading the format.

Comment 19

[Randy Brachman]

I experienced the same with vCard from another aviation site.  I found that it
reads the date correctly if the 'DTStart:' is changed to 'DTSTART:' and 'DTEnd:'
to 'DTEND'.

(In reply to comment #18)
> Created an attachment (id=177574) [edit]
> Calendar can't read dates in this file.
> 
> This is a VCS file output by the site MyFBO.com. Sunbird (Mozilla Calendar) is
> able to import the text fields, but not the datetime fields. They initialize to
> today 12am. May be an issue reading the format.
> 

Comment 20

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

We don't need this tracking bug, because the underlying requirement document is outdated and has therefore been removed.