Do you or does your company host events? Do you want your friends and customers to easily add your events to their calendars and receive automatic reminders? Do your friends or clients use Windows Live Calendar, or would you like them to start? (Maybe if they had an online calendar with built-in reminders they’d finally remember to come to your events and parties !)
Today I’ll talk about one way you make your events easily available to Windows Live Calendar users from any Web page. This allows visitors to your blog or web site to add your event to their Windows Live Calendar in one click. Well, two really.
All it takes for this to work is a single link in your Web page. Here’s what the URL looks like:
When users click that link, they will go right to Windows Live Calendar with an “Add Event” dialog pre-filled with your data (see below). All they have to do is click Save. If they’d like, they can also customize reminders, write remarks in the Details, or make any other changes they’d like before saving it. Nifty eh?
So, what is all this gobbledygook in the URL and how do you make it work for you?
Looking at the url we first see rru=addevent. This is required and means the first thing to do after logging in is to bring up the “add new event” form. The additional parameters specify your data:
|
dtstart |
Start date and time |
|
dtend |
End date and time |
|
summary |
The title of the event |
|
location |
The location of the event |
|
description |
The detailed description of the event |
So all you need to do is complete the URL with your event’s information in these parameters, making sure it is URL-encoded properly , and you’re ready to go!
Now go ye forth and – no, wait, there’s still one trick here. What about those dates? How do you format the date text? Well, since this was primarily intended for automated use by businesses and developers the date parsing isn’t very forgiving. It accepts dates in a format that you might normally only see buried in a .ics file, something called an ISO8601 date. The format for this is:
YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ
YYYY is the 4 digit year, MM is the 2 digit month, DD is the 2 digit day. T is literally the letter T (must be upper case). HHMMSS are hour, minute, and second in 24-hour time. The Z also has to be upper case and it means the entire string is a UTC time. So yes, to use this API you have to first convert your start (and end) time into UTC before you can use this API. You can also omit the Z and leave the time in local time, but this means the event is in “floating” time. A “floating” event at 2pm will happen at 2pm in each and every time zone. It is good if all the visitors are local or if you want an event to occur at midnight no matter where users are located, but not so good for coordinating worldwide events.
Lastly, a couple of tips for best usage:
- Set the target of the link to be “_new” or “_top”. Calendar uses the entire browser window to avoid layout issues and cross site scripting bugs. So you should plan for that up front – this target will remind you that this link is going to break users out of your UI entirely. And when the user is finished we leave her in the Calendar UI rather than returning her to your site, you may wish to target “_new” to maintain site continuity in the original window/tab.
- For the same reason, don’t try to load the link in just one part of your UI if you are using frames. We’ll break out of the frame and take over your whole UI.
That’s it, you’re now ready to go!
-Evan
