ICal

A library for reading and writing iCalendar data.

Features

• Parsing iCalendar data from strings or files
• Serializing iCalendar data to iolists suitable for writing out to files, send over the network, etc.
• Integration with Plug / Phoenix via ICal.encode_to_iodata
• Components supported
  • Events (with alarms)
  • Todos (with alarms)
  • Journals
  • Timezones
  • Alarms
• Recurrence calculations
• Alarm calculations
• Compatibility
  • RFC 5545 compliant
  • Support for common non-standard properties, including:
    • X-WR-TIMEZONE
    • X-WR-CALNAME/NAME
  • Timezones are resolved using the system timezone library, supporting variants seen in the wild
  • AllX-* fields and valid-by-not-yet-supported fields are retained

Future work

Components that will eventually be supported (in rough order):

• Free/busy (VFREEBUSY)

Usage

Full documentation can be found on Hexdocs.

The primary entry points are ICal.from_ics/1 and ICal.from_file/1 for parsing iCalendar data, and ICal.to_ics/1 for serializing an %ICal{} to an iodata ready for writing to a file, sending over the network, etc.

calendar = ICal.from_file(ical_path)
%ICal{events: events} = calendar
ics_iodata = ICal.to_ics(calendar)

To accommodate applications which use rrule strings on their own, ICal.Recurrence structs can be created these strings using ICal.Recurrence.from_ics/1:

ICal.Recurrence.from_ics("RRULE:RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;COUNT=10;BYMONTH=6,7")

Recurrence dates may be calculated from either a calendar component or a %ICal.Recurrence{} using the ICal.Recurrence.stream/2 function, while alarms may be resolved using ICal.Alarm.next_alarms/1.

Inline attachments can be decoded via ICal.Attachment.decoded_data/1.

Installation

• Add :ical to your list of dependencies in mix.exs, along with a timezone database:

  def deps do
    [{:ical, "~> 1.0"}]
      {:ical, "~> 1.0"},
      {:tz, "~> 1.1"}
    ]
  end

  Then configure the timezone database in e.g. config/config.exs:

  config :elixir, :time_zone_database, Tz.TimeZoneDatabase

  For auto-updating the timezone database at runtime, check the documentation for the timezone library you are using.

  The following timezone database packages are known to work well with ICal:

  Package	Module
  tz	Tz.TimeZoneDatabase
  time_zone_info	TimeZoneInfo.TimeZoneDatabase

  See tzdb_test for more information on the available timezone database libraries.

Goals

• corrrect: support the iCalendar (and its related) RFCs for standards-compliance
• useful: handle real-world data (such as produced by other clients) gracefully, do not lose data while parsing (including fields not supported by / used in this library)
• good developer experience
  • parsed results should be easy to use, even if iCalednar is a complex format
  • typed structs and clear APIs
  • good doucmentation
• resource friendly: be performant in parsing and serializing
• reliable: be well-tested, beyond just code coverage

Participating in development

Visit the issue tracker to see what tasks are outstanding. You are welcome to file new issues, as well!

PRs are welcome and responded to in a timely fashion.

Benchee is used for benchmarking, credo for linting, and the test suite must pass before PRs are merged. New functionality and bug fixes must have accompanying unit tests.