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Advantage of Open Event Format over xCal, pentabarf/frab XML and iCal

Event apps like Giggity and Giraffe use event formats like xCal, pentabarf/frab XML, iCal etc. In this blog, I present some of the advantages of using FOSSASIA’s Open Event data format over other formats. I added support for Open Event format in these two apps so I describe the advantages and improvements that were made with respect to them.

  • The main problem that is faced in Giggity app is that all the data like social links, microlocations, the link for the logo file etc., can not be fetched from a single file, so a separate raw file is being added to provide this data. Our Open Event format provides all this information from the single URL that could be received from the server so no need to use any separate file.
  • Here is the pentabarf format data for FOSSASIA 2016 conference excluding sessions. Although it provides all the necessary information it leaves the information for logo URL, details for longitude and latitude for microlocations (rooms) and links to social media and website. While the open event format provides all the missing details including some extra information like language, comments etc. See FOSSASIA 2016 Open Event format sample.
<conference>
<title>FOSSASIA 2016</title>
<subtitle/>
<venue>Science Centre Road</venue>
<city>Singapore</city>
<start>2016-03-18</start>
<end>2016-03-20</end>
<days>3</days>
<day_change>09:00:00</day_change>
<timeslot_duration>00:00:00</timeslot_duration>
</conference>
  • The parsing of received file format gets very complicated in case of iCal, xCal etc. as tags needs to be matched to get the data. Howsoever there are various libraries available for parsing JSON data. So we can create simply an array list of the received data to send it to the adapter. See this example for more information of working code. You can also see the parser for iCal to compare the complexity of the code.
  • The other more common problem is the structure of the formats received is sometimes it becomes complicated to define the sub parts of a single element. For example for the location we define latitude and longitude separately while in iCal format it is just separated by a comma. For example for

iCal

GEO:1.333194;103.736132

JSON

{
           "id": 1,
           "name": "Stage 1",
           "floor": 0,
           "latitude": 37.425420,
           "longitude": -122.080291,
           "room": null
}

And the information provided is more detailed.

  • Open Event format is well documented and it makes it easier for other developers to work on it. Find the documentation here.

References:

 

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