702206 - Support new VALARM properties (RFC 9074)

Status: ASSIGNED

(Calendar :: Alarms, defect, P2)

Description

[ljelly]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.932.0 Safari/535.8

Steps to reproduce:

Reminder Notifications in thunderbird with apple icloud lightning calendar integration.
I click dismiss or dismiss all.



Actual results:

It dismisses all the events, the problem is that when i have dismissed these reminders on my iphone it does not dismiss them on my computer using thunderbird.


Expected results:

The events should dismiss and not be reminded in thunderbird after the alert has occured on my iphone and dismissed.

Comment 1

[ljelly]

the version of thunderbird is thunderbird 10.0 alpha 2 aurora build lightning alpha 1.2a2

Comment 2

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Kind of hard to achieve since dismissing alarms remotely is not standardized. Does the iPhone add any information to the event at all if it is dismissed? You can test this by:

1. create non-recurring event with alarm
2. copy the event to the clipboard, paste into text editor
3. wait for alarm to fire
4. dismiss on iPhone
5. reload remote calendars in Lightning
6. copy the event to the clipboard, also paste into text editor
7. compare the two events pasted

Comment 3

[ljelly]

Attachment: Lightning Event copied clipboard into txt editor. before and after dismissing of event on lightning and iphone.

This is the text edit file i made on my computer using lightning and not using the iphone cause I cannot copy events to clipboard and copy them to text editor from ios device. so I used lightning for these logs.. I hope these outputs make sense..

Comment 4

[ljelly]

using instructions from comment 2 and lightning.
(In reply to ljelly from comment #3)
> Created attachment 574559 [details]
> Lightning Event copied clipboard into txt editor. before and after
> dismissing of event on lightning and iphone.
> 
> This is the text edit file i made on my computer using lightning and not
> using the iphone cause I cannot copy events to clipboard and copy them to
> text editor from ios device. so I used lightning for these logs.. I hope
> these outputs make sense..

Comment 5

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

So the event before and after dismissing on the iphone is the same, so there is no way we can detect if the event was dismissed. I'm sorry but it seems we can't fix this bug.

Comment 6

[ljelly]

i have asked this forum on Apple's Support Discussions to see if I can get a reply or answer..

Hopefully there is a way..

Comment 7

[Matthew Mecca [:mmecca]]

This type of shared calendar setup is likely becoming a lot more common, I think we should revisit the way our alarm service integrates with remote calendars. Bug 496889 should help here.

Comment 8

[ljelly]

I have a proposal idea for Lightning Calendar Integration Notification System:
Instead of Using a diaologue box in Ubuntu for reminders of calendar events.
Is there a way to develop a notification system that is based on the new message alerts icon which are similar to growl in MAC OS X, in Ubuntu. 

As an example:
When a Calendar Reminder is set.
It triggers a notification in the top right hand corner of your screen in ubuntu, that is similar to an incoming email message. Now for this to work effectively the user has to have options of what to do with his notification. (It can also play a sound)
1. The user has to be able to click on his calendar reminder notification that has gone off. It then should be dismissed automatically. and the user is then sent to Lightning.. where the calendar event is displayed and selected automatically (the notification corresponds with the event). The user then clicks on the event, to modify or edit it.
2. The Event Notification goes off, It is displayed and left as a notification for up to 3 or 5 seconds. so that the user has time to choose option 1. otherwise it may automatically dismiss and leave the screen. The user obviously knows about the event. (The time of the notification being displayed can be varied in the preferences of lightning)
3. If the alarm fires in lightning or on a mobile device, it can be dismissed either on lightning or the mobile device (iphone.) Which then triggers either one of them to dismiss the notification automatically.

Comment 9

[ljelly]

SPELL CHECK!(In reply to ljelly from comment #8)
> I have a proposal idea for Lightning Calendar Integration Notification
> System:
> Instead of Using a dialogue box in Ubuntu for reminders of calendar events.
> Is there a way to develop a notification system that is based on the new
> message alerts icon which are similar to growl in MAC OS X, in Ubuntu. 
> 
> As an example:
> When a Calendar Reminder is set.
> It triggers a notification in the top right hand corner of your screen in
> ubuntu, that is similar to an incoming email message. Now for this to work
> effectively the user has to have options of what to do with the
> notification. (It can also play a sound)
> 1. The user has to be able to click on the calendar reminder notification
> that has gone off. It then should be dismissed automatically. and the user
> is then sent to Lightning.. where the calendar event is displayed and
> selected automatically (the notification corresponds with the event). The
> user then clicks on the event, to modify or edit it.
> 2. The Event Notification goes off, It is displayed and left as a
> notification for up to 3 or 5 seconds. so that the user has time to choose
> option 1. otherwise it may automatically dismiss and leave the screen. The
> user obviously knows about the event. (The time of the notification being
> displayed can be varied in the preferences of lightning)
> 3. If the alarm fires in lightning or on a mobile device at the same time, it can be
> dismissed either on lightning or the mobile device (iphone.) Which then
> triggers the mobile device or lightning which ever is first to dismiss the event automatically on both machines. If either one is offline or not in sync, it does not get the notification the offline device) once online it gets the events but not the previous notifications of the past events.

Comment 10

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Attachment: WiP - v1

Just so this doesn't get lost, here is a patch that might fix it. There are some emerging standards for this, but they are still in flux. The patch is missing migration from our old alarm props.

Comment 11

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

So we might have to move forward on this a bit faster. I found a recurring event in my calendar I cannot dismiss, and I suspect that Lightning is breaking it. I use Lightning, iCal and an iPhone to access this calendar. When (presumably) iCal dismisses the event, it adds an ACKNOWLEDGED property to the VALARM. Lightning doesn't understand this property and adds:

BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
TRIGGER;VALUE=DURATION:-P1D
DESCRIPTION:Reminder
X-WR-ALARMUID:38425C56-D51D-48A9-BA3B-4FF5CE1E7EB3
UID:38425C56-D51D-48A9-BA3B-4FF5CE1E7EB3
X-LIC-ERROR;X-LIC-ERRORTYPE=PROPERTY-PARSE-ERROR:Parse error in property na
 me: ACKNOWLEDGED
END:VALARM

The event has a lot of these entries. An intermediate solution would be to just add the design data, we can do this immediately. If the migration isn't too bad, we can go for the full solution too. The VALARM extensions are more stable now, I'll take a look at what has changed and provide an updated patch.

Comment 12

[666f6f]

There seems to be an (expired) internet draft that describes some VALARM extensions for iCalendar here https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-valarm-extensions. I haven't checked if iPhone/Apple Mail use these extensions but the draft is from Apple.

Comment 13

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Yes, these are the VALARM props I was working on. I believe Cyrus just hasn't gotten around to moving these forward, there are some other drafts that have higher priority. They are being actively used and aside from IETF discussion results I don't think there will be many changes. Its already being used at Apple.

Comment 14

[Ben Greiner]

They are used and there are cases where they break Thunderbird's functionality: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460001

Comment 15

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-calext-valarm-extensions-04

Comment 16

[Max Emig [:maxe]]

To be clear, it was a draft for a long time but was properly published in 2021: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9074

Comment 17

[Max Emig [:maxe]]

I do not see any open issue or pull request on https://github.com/kewisch/ical.js, which is the prerequisite to any possible work here.

Please give some advice on the appropriate order of implementation and review process between ical.js and Thunderbird to me or any other potential contributor here.

Comment 18

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

In theory ical.js should support VALARM extensions, as it supports arbitrary components. There were some dependencies back with the wip patch since libical needed specific design data. You should be able to do the remainder of the work in Thunderbird code. From faint memory I believe the main issues back then why I didn't complete this was migration work. We have a bunch of alarms with the x-moz properties, so the old system kind of still needs to work.

Do you have any changes for ical.js in mind that I missed?

Comment 19

[Max Emig [:maxe]]

Attachment: Bug 702206 - Use RFC 9074 VALARM properties for alarm state. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

Draft attempt.

Comment 20

[Max Emig [:maxe]]

Sorry for the amount of e-mails you may have received by now.

No matter whether my patch will make it or not, I propose a lazy migration where our old custom X-MOZ- attributes stay untouched unless the date/time of an event or alarms attached to it are touched, editing the description of an event should not silently upgrade to VALARM.

Backwards compatibility with older Thunderbird releases cannot be a concern forever, afaik there are no other users of the X-MOZ- style attributes not capable of also parsing modern VALARM.

For clarity, I am talking about X-MOZ-LASTACK, X-MOZ-SNOOZE-TIME as well as X-MOZ-SNOOZE-TIME-*.