xCalendar

FOSSASIA‘s Open Event Server is the REST API backend for the event management platform, Open Event. Here, the event organizers can create their events, add tickets for it and manage all aspects from the schedule to the speakers. Also, once he makes his event public, others can view it and buy tickets if interested.

To make event promotion easier, we also provide the event organizer to export his event as an xCalendar file. xCal is an XML representation of the iCalendar standard. xCal is not an alternative nor next generation of iCalendar. xCal represents iCalendar components, properties, and parameters as defined in iCalendar. This format was selected to ease its translation back to the iCalendar format using an XSLT transform.

Server side – generating the xCal file

Here we will be using the xml.etree.ElementTree package for Python for parsing and creating XML data.

from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, SubElement, tostring

• We define a class XCalExporter which has a static method export(event_id).
• Query the event using the event_id passed and start forming the calendar:

event = Event.query.get(event_id)

tz = event.timezone or 'UTC'
tz = pytz.timezone(tz)

i_calendar_node = Element('iCalendar')
i_calendar_node.set('xmlns:xCal', 'urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xcal')
v_calendar_node = SubElement(i_calendar_node, 'vcalendar')
version_node = SubElement(v_calendar_node, 'version')
version_node.text = '2.0'
prod_id_node = SubElement(v_calendar_node, 'prodid')
prod_id_node.text = '-//fossasia//open-event//EN'
cal_desc_node = SubElement(v_calendar_node, 'x-wr-caldesc')
cal_desc_node.text = "Schedule for sessions at " + event.name
cal_name_node = SubElement(v_calendar_node, 'x-wr-calname')
cal_name_node.text = event.name

• We query for the accepted sessions of the event and store it in sessions

sessions = Session.query \
   .filter_by(event_id=event_id) \
   .filter_by(state='accepted') \
   .filter(Session.deleted_at.is_(None)) \
   .order_by(asc(Session.starts_at)).all()

• We then iterate through all the sessions in sessions.
• If it is a valid session, we instantiate a SubElement and store required details

v_event_node = SubElement(v_calendar_node, 'vevent')

method_node = SubElement(v_event_node, 'method')
method_node.text = 'PUBLISH'

uid_node = SubElement(v_event_node, 'uid')
uid_node.text = str(session.id) + "-" + event.identifier

dtstart_node = SubElement(v_event_node, 'dtstart')
dtstart_node.text = tz.localize(session.starts_at).isoformat()

…. So on

• We then loop through all the speakers in that particular session and add it to the xCal calendar node object as well.

for speaker in session.speakers:
   attendee_node = SubElement(v_event_node, 'attendee')
   attendee_node.text = speaker.name

• And finally, the string of the calendar node is returned. This is the xCalendar file contents. This can be directly written to a file.

return tostring(i_calendar_node)

Obtaining the xCal file:

Firstly, we have an API endpoint which starts the task on the server.

GET - /v1/events/{event_identifier}/export/xcal

Here, event_identifier is the unique ID of the event. This endpoint starts a celery task on the server to export the event as an xCal file. It returns the URL of the task to get the status of the export task. A sample response is as follows:

{
  "task_url": "/v1/tasks/b7ca7088-876e-4c29-a0ee-b8029a64849a"
}

The user can go to the above-returned URL and check the status of his Celery task. If the task completed successfully he will get the download URL. The endpoint to check the status of the task is:

and the corresponding response from the server –

{
  "result": {
    "download_url": "/v1/events/1/exports/http://localhost/static/media/exports/1/zip/OGpMM0w2RH/event1.zip"
  },
  "state": "SUCCESS"
}

The file can be downloaded from the above mentioned URL.

Hence, now the event can be added to any scheduling app which recognizes the xcs format.

References

• Open Event Server
• Python
• iCalendar
• xCal
• XML Writer
• Celery