Re: Status google calendar sync

[Mark Elston <m_elston@comcast.net>]

On 1/26/2011 4:52 PM, Arun Persaud wrote:
> Hi
>
>> You are right that googlecl is poorly documented, and worse, it doesn't
>> even work as the documentation says it should.  Try retrieving calendar
>> events with --fields="title,when" and see what happens.  I get the
>> title printed out but the "when" always comes out as None.
>
> my man pages for googlecl don't mention a "fields" options. Doing
>
> "google calendar list when,where,title"
>
> works for me though (using googlecl that comes with openSUSE 11.3).
>

I try this and get absolutely nothing.  Just an empty calendar line.
I am using the latest (0.9.12), BTW.  If you enter

   google --help

part of the help is:

   --fields=FIELDS       Fields to list with list task.


>> However, I have had better luck with the python gdata interface.  The
>> docs aren't much better but I have managed to figure out how to modify
>> an existing event using it.  And, there are examples of how to search
>> for specific events...
>
> cool, do you have this integrated with org? if so could you post the code?

Not yet.  I have just started playing with it so I wanted to get a feel
for how to do some of the basics (which took some playing first).  There
are some really simple examples on the website but for anything more
complicated you need to look at either how the XML is structured or
take a look at JSON info and try to deduce from there what is needed in
the python code.  It isn't always (or even usually) obvious...  At least
it hasn't been for me so far.

>> While using googlecl might be interesting it would probably be simpler
>> to come up with a specific library for doing the things that need to
>> be done directly with gdata (which is what googlecl uses anyway) and
>> calling scripts that make use of this specific library, instead.
>
> I guess one could also use google calendar completely without googlecl
> or gdata, since you can point google at an .ics file to import it into
> google's calendar and Eric's script already handles the other way
> (google->org).

Perhaps, but one of the things I want to do is to share a couple of my
Google calendars with specific groups of people. I have a home, work,
and two different teaching calendars.  If I have an .ics file on my
machine that doesn't help much in the sharing, does it?  I don't know
as I have never used an .ics file for anything yet.

I would like to maintain info about upcoming classes in my org file and,
when things change, update the calendar with the appropriate
information.  Occasionally I have had to reschedule classes, for
example, or break a single session into two sessions.  What I want is
to publish the resulting information after all my org file manipulations
are done so my students can see the results.

Mark