1832063 - Provide option to edit raw calendar entry/source

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Calendar :: Dialogs, enhancement)

Description

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: vCalendar calendar file with event repeating every 28h

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/112.0

Steps to reproduce:

I did require a very specific event with options not provided by Lightning, specifically an event repeating every 28 hours, although there are other instances where I'm running into limitations of what the UI can (reasonably) offer.

An instance of such an event is attached as sleep_exp.ics, which in some aspects I can not edit in the UI (like setting an end-date).

Actual results:

I can only edit the end time of the event by exporting it, editing the exported file, importing and overwriting the old entry. I can only create the event by creating it in a text editor outside the Calendar and importing.

Expected results:

Effectively I would like the edit dialogue for an event to also provide an option to view the source (similar to Ctrl+U in Firefox&Thunderbird) as well as an option to edit the raw calendar entry for when I need features that are not provided by the Calendar UI.

The features I occasionally use and cannot access via the Calendar are diverse and most of them would probably confuse other users to no end, and I kind of like the sleek version of the UI, so I wouldn't want the Calendar to expand and cover every possible combination allowed by the format.

Thus allowing a raw edit feature will give me a reasonable workaround that, if labeled correctly, will not be something that users accidentally stumble into I think, and will also not overload the UI, basically side-stepping the UI that's built for 99.9999% of the users for my 0.0001% use-case.

Comment 1

[Andrei [:sancus]]

This is the type of thing that should be an add-on, definitely not a feature that we would expose in the normal user interface.

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

Let me rephrase: it would be very useful to have a built-in tool that benefits developers of the software as well as add-ons, and users with edge-cases, allowing the former to insert data to see if the software or add-on performs correctly and retrieve data written by it to test its correct operation, while the latter could use advanced features which the software itself does not provide, without requiring them to effectively write an application of their own (considering such an add-on does not currently exist), similar to how Right-Click ⇒ Inspect Element empowers browser users to test, debug, inspect, and change the content of an HTML page.
Specifically such a tool would make all use-cases possible, albeit requiring some domain-specific knowledge, whereas writing the add-on would require plenty of domain-specific knowledge of a domain which is not relevant to the person editing a calendar event.
This could also be used to provide assistance in bug reports that happen with specific calendar events, as it side-steps the export/import process and allows the raw content of the event to be used to reproduce issues consistently.
The maintainers can also benefit from this in bug reports where users copy their event and trim down the contents until the bug is triggered, thereby providing users with the ability to file bug reports containing a minimal example of what is required to trigger a bug, aiding in debugging and fixing of code further down the line.

Other edge-cases I've dealt with before that suffer from this are:

• migration from one server-side calendar software to another where the formats are not 100% compatible or the events contain implausible data interpreted in different ways (users can then check the source of the corresponding events and fix any errors that arise)
• read additional metadata fields provided by other clients which this software does not interpret or render (also enabling the user to provide snippets of the data which is not being interpreted in a potential feature request)
• trim extraneous information for purposes such as forwarding events or cleaning up the history of a long-standing recurring event (considering that recurring events can have additional entries in case one occurrence was moved or changed otherwise, it may even be required for users to undertake this in corporate environments due to e.g. GDPR; PII may be contained as part of a single instance of a diverging occurrence, which cannot easily be removed via the UI)

Feel free to close the issue as Won't Fix however.