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

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

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).

Bye,
Tassilo