Re: Timezone/Encoding issues when exporting as ics and importing to Google Calendar

[Kevin Brubeck Unhammer <unhammer@fsfe.org>]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

> Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com> writes:
>
> Hi Nick,
>
>>> 2. Timezone: I live in Germany and thus all my timestamps are CEST.  The
>>>    exported ics file properly declare X-WR-TIMEZONE:CEST.  However,
>>>    since we also have DST, in summer all appointments show up 2 hours
>>>    late, and in winter my appointments show up 1 hour late.  Is there
>>>    anything I can do about it?  The google calendar settings have CEST
>>>    as timezone...
>>> 
>>
>> I don't know if this is the problem you are running into, but
>> icalendar--convert-tz-offset is buggy as-is: it looks as if additional
>> work was planned for it, but it never got done.  In particular, it
>> assumes there is an RRULE in the icalendar file and does not translate
>> timezones otherwise.
>
> I don't know the iCalendar spec so I don't know what an RRULE is.  But
> as far as I can see, `icalendar--convert-tz-offset' is used while
> converting an ics file to the diary format.
>
>> Reading your mail again, I guess you are having problems in the
>> other direction,
>
> Right. ;-)
>
>> but IME, if there is a bug somewhere, there is at least one more going
>> the other way :-)
>
> Probably.  Looking at the ical spec, this X-WR-TIMEZONE property is an
> optional extension nobody has to obey.  Org exports the times like
>
>   DTSTART:20110317T091500
>
> which means "local time".  So probably the google server has UTC as
> local time, my preferences say I want to use Berlin-time, so all events
> get two hours added in summer.
>
> Now I've tried to explicitly set the timezone information using
>
>     org-icalendar-timezone "Europe/Berlin"
>     org-icalendar-date-time-format ";TZID=%Z:%Y%m%dT%H%M%S"
>
> and now the events are like
>
>     DTSTART;TZID=EUROPE/BERLIN:20110322T140000
>     DTEND;TZID=EUROPE/BERLIN:20110322T160000
>
> However, that doesn't change anything in google calendar...
>
> Finally, I've set GMT+0 as my current timezone in google calendar, and
> now my appointments are shown correctly.  Ok, that's not really a
> solution but only a workaround...
>
> Oh, there's another possibility; setting
>
>     org-icalendar-date-time-format ":%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ"
>
> which then seems to correctly recalculate the local times in my org
> files to GMT.  So for an entry that starts at 14:30 and ends an 16:30,
> that's what exported.
>
>   DTSTART:20100518T123000Z
>   DTEND:20100518T143000Z
>
> Looks good, I'd say.  But when importing that to google calendar, it
> shows that entry starting at 16:30 and ending at 18:30 Berlin-time.  Now
> what's that?!?
>
> Oh, it seems to be some caching issue.  Although the new ics file is on
> the server now, it seems that a reload of google calendar doesn't
> reimport all imported calendars.  So I'll wait a bit and report back
> what methods work (explicit TZIDs and/or export as UTC).

Did you ever find out what methods worked best? I just bumped into the
same problem with 30boxes, which shows

DTSTART:20120228T180000Z as 19:00 (should be 18:00)
and
DTSTART:20120228T180000 as 00:00 the day after

(the web calender is set to GMT+1, the exported ics shows
X-WR-TIMEZONE:CET)


I guess I'll have to upgrade my org-mode version (6.33x) to get
org-icalendar-date-time-format?


best regards,
Kevin Brubeck Unhammer