Org Agenda and recurring icalendar events

Org Agenda and recurring icalendar events

[cschr]

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Hello together

 

Im now running Emacs 25.1 with Org 8.3.5 on Windows.   I love Emacs and
Orgmode and I want to use it instead of Microsoft Office.   But in order to
replace MS-Outlook calendar by Org Agenda, and in order to sync Org Agenda
with my Android phone, I would need all icalendar functionality, which is
used by MS-Outlook and by Android, implemented in Orgmode. Most urgently
missing are recurrence features like RRULE, EXDATE, DTSTART, DTEND, etc, and
import and export of those from and to icalendar.   The current
implementation is only rudimentary.

 

Emacs diary is not suitable - import and export from and to icalendar are
also not working properly for most recurring events, and of course it misses
the Orgmode features.

 

My idea would be to introduce recurring icalendar elements like RRULE,
EXDATE, DTSTART and DTEND as Org Properties, which would make importing and
exporting them straightforward, I guess. Main work would be to make these
dates show up in the Org Agenda properly.

 

Wonderful would be to have this functionality as an official part of orgmode
and maintained

 

A similar work was started in 2013 already:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/74391

 

But that’s all I was able to find on the web about this subject – it seems
no work is going on here - or does anybody know there is?

 

Im wondering if this idea is of interest to anybody else – to me this is a
real killer feature for using Org Agenda.

 

I had sent the below emails via bug-gnu-emacs, but there was no response –
was it the wrong place to send to ?

 

I don’t have Emacs development knowledge.  Is there any expert here who
could tell me if this is possible at all, whether this could become part of
official orgmode and how, and what could the effort be – is this a few
weeks, or a few months, or much more work ?

 

Thank you so much

 

Kind regards

Chris

 

 

 

 

From: cschr [mailto:cschr@freenet.de] 
Sent: 12 August 2016 09:34
To: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: RE: Subject: 25.0.94; Proposal to make orgmode agenda really useful

 

RRULE might better be an orgmode PROPERTY too, like proposed for Recurrence
End Date and Exceptions in
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/74391>
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/74391

 

In fact, its several properties, but not all are needed for Android Sync. I
only need: RRULE_FREQ, RRULE_INTERVAL, RRULE_BYDAY, RRULE_COUNT,
RRULE_UNTIL. 

Also, EXDATE is needed which is not part of RRULE but part of VEVENT, and
TRIGGER which is part of VALARM

 

 

From: cschr [ <mailto:cschr@freenet.de> mailto:cschr@freenet.de] 
Sent: 10 August 2016 20:27
To:  <mailto:bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: Subject: 25.0.94; Proposal to make orgmode agenda really useful

 

I love emacs - its incredibly powerful and helpful - its almost all i

ever dreamt of. 

 

One thing i miss urgently: make org agenda files fully sync with my

icalendar files, including recurrance with end dates, and including alarms.

RRule Exceptions would also be helpfull. 

 

Here are my ideas, and I would be curious to hear your plans:

 

1. Would it be an idea to implement a DIARY_RRULE function which can be used

in date sexpr in org agenda (and maybe also the diary) and which accepts

an icalendar RRULE string as parameter ?   This could make icalendar

export and import very easy (just copy the string), and implementation

in elisp shouldnt be too hard (but thats something I can only guess -

you know it better).

 

2. exceptions and end dates could also be implemented as org properties,

as already proposed by  <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/74391>
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/74391

 

3. At the moment i am stuck because my icalendar file can only be

imported into the diary: import into org files is restricted to single
events

(and maybe very simple recurring events?). And the diary import uses
diary-date

a lot which cannot be exported, and diary export does not create VALARms,

and the ORG features are not available for the diary.

 

Thanks a lot for your great work !!!

Kind regards – Christoph Schröder, Cham, Switzerland

 

 


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Re: Org Agenda and recurring icalendar events

[Eric S Fraga]

On Friday, 30 Sep 2016 at 08:54, cschr wrote:
> Hello together
>
> Im now running Emacs 25.1 with Org 8.3.5 on Windows.  I love Emacs and
> Orgmode and I want to use it instead of Microsoft Office.  But in
> order to replace MS-Outlook calendar by Org Agenda, and in order to
> sync Org Agenda with my Android phone, I would need all icalendar
> functionality, which is used by MS-Outlook and by Android, implemented
> in Orgmode. Most urgently missing are recurrence features like RRULE,
> EXDATE, DTSTART, DTEND, etc, and import and export of those from and
> to icalendar.  The current implementation is only rudimentary.

Rudimentary but works, at least for me, albeit using Google calendar and
not Outlook as the latter is so non-standard that it's a
nightmare.  Google is marginally better although not fantastic either.

With Google calendar, the easiest way to have org and Android/Windows
synchronised is to use MobileOrg and have it take care of the
synchronisation with the calendar.  This will handle many but not all of
your cases, specifically excluded dates and end dates for recurring
events which org does not support out of the box.

Alternatively, you can have two separate processes for synchronisation
in each direction: converting from ics to org and vice versa.  This has
been discussed many times on the list and there is material on worg.

> I had sent the below emails via bug-gnu-emacs, but there was no
> response – was it the wrong place to send to ?

Not sure whether wrong or not but this mailing list is the best place
for discussions of this form as you are requesting a feature as opposed
to reporting a bug.


-- 
: Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 25.1.1, Org release_8.3.6-1131-gd68497