[Vobject] VAVAILABILITY usage / documentation ?

[Jeffrey Harris]

Hi Erik,

>     I need some code that will track availability in a calendar with
> multiple vevents.  Looking around I wondered if the "vavailability"
> stuff would do that.  If not I'd be happy to write it and contribute;
> but I'd like to avoid reinventing the wheel if someone has done this
> already.

Let me see if I understand what you're looking for. You'd like to describe availability in some way, based on a set of (possibly recurring) events that should block the calendar?

If so, I think you're looking for VFREEBUSY. VAVAILABILITY is an enhancement on top of VFREEBUSY that gives a more ergonomic syntax for describing a mask outside of which everything is busy. But ultimately, a VFREEBUSY will describe what's busy and what's not in a given time range.

I think it would be great for vobject, or a thin wrapper on top of vobject, to provide an API where you pass in a list of VEVENT/VAVAILABILITY/VFREEBUSY components and a time range, and return a VFREEBUSY for that time range. CalendarServer almost certainly has open source code that does this now, but I'm not sure if it's easy to pull that logic out. I would ask about this on the calendarserver-dev mailing list if you're interested.

In general, patches that add/fix functionality in vobject are very welcome!

>     Unfortunately I'm unable to find the documentation for what
> exactly vavailability is or how it works.  I did some googling,
> checked the cal-server folk's wiki, searched the vobject mailing list
> archives, and even browsed through the past year or so of traffic on
> the mailing list to no avail.

I think you're looking for the VAVAILABILITY draft (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-calendar-availability). But if you haven't already, I'd read about VFREEBUSY in RFC5545 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545) first.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey