I will share with the mailing list my employer's use case, and maybe it
can provide inspiration or insight into the iCalendar integration.
We are a manufacturing company, and we have a lot of fixed assets in
need of maintenance, so we use the OFBiz Asset Maintenance application.
The application is able to create maintenances automatically - based on
time intervals or meter readings. Those automatically-generated
maintenances appear in various iCalendars. Maintenance workers can check
their calendar with a calendar client like Sunbird, or with a mobile
device like a Blackberry or iPhone.
Our office workers use Thunderbird + Lightning. Calendars are shared
using the OFBiz server.
We have iCalendars set up for our two conference rooms. Office workers
can check conference room availability before scheduling a meeting.
We have a calendar set up for vacations/time off. Office workers can
check that calendar for scheduling conflicts or availability.
All of these things *could* be done through the Work Effort web UI, but
it is really convenient to have the ability to use calendaring clients
(desktop or mobile) instead.
-Adrian
Christopher Snow wrote:
Thanks for the tips Adrian,
I'm only using sunbird while testing. For production we have a flex
developer who will be creating a flex UI for the calendar, we still have
many questions to answer such as whether to access the calendar
information using iCalendar, or to expose the workeffort services using
REST.
Many thanks,
Chris
Adrian Crum wrote:
It can be tricky getting things set up correctly, but once they are
everything should work as expected.
Some notes on using Sunbird:
1. Setting alarms on an OFBiz iCalendar means the alarms will be
shared by everyone accessing the calendar. So, if one user dismisses
the alarm it is dismissed for everyone. This has been reported to
Mozilla, and they are in no hurry to do anything about it.
2. If Sunbird attempts to refresh the screen and the OFBiz server is
temporarily unavailable, Sunbird will set the OFBiz iCalendar to
read-only mode. It must be manually changed back to read/write.
-Adrian
Christopher Snow wrote:
Hi Adrian,
I think I had to associate a child event to the iCalendar workeffort
before I could create events in Sunbird. - I can't remember exactly
I have tried so many combinations of things now!
Many thanks,
Chris
Adrian Crum wrote:
Chris,
Make sure Sunbird is authenticating to OFBiz and that the user has
the correct permissions. According to the iCalendar spec, in order
to update a calendar, the user must be the calendar owner or a
delegate.
-Adrian
Christopher Snow wrote:
When I use a calendar application (sunbird) to access my iCalendar
and create an event, the event doesn't show in the ofbiz calendar.
Looking though the ofbiz code, it looks as though the iCalendar
implementation only stores data in WorkEffortIcalData. I was
expecting to be able to see externally scheduled items appear in
the ofbiz calendar and vice versa.
Have I understood this correctly?
Many thanks in advance,
Chris
