VCard and ICal support

From Open-Xchange

VCard and ICal are definitions of text-based PIM information in files. In OX terms, VCard defines contact data, while ICal defines both Tasks and Appointments. ICal internally identifies itself as VCalendar 2.0, which illustrates who closely related both protocols are. That is why questions on both formats are answered in one article.

This article deals with features that are in VCard and ICal but are problematic within the OX.

RRULE: "The second last sunday in a month"

ICal allows you to define an appointment which occurs "the second last sunday every month". OX simply does not. We only support counting from the beginning of a month, but not from the end. Since a month might have either four or five occurrences of a certain day, it is not possible for us to simply convert this.

Behavior: An ICal appointment containing this property is not imported.

See RFC 2445, 4.8.5.4 Recurrence Rule

ALARM: "Remind me four times"

ICal allows you to set an alarm which should be repeated four times before ending. This might be interesting for an alarm clock, but for a web-based tool with will be used asynchronous in most cases, we handle this differently. Therefore, OX does not support an ALARM with a REPEAT property.

Behavior: This property is ignored.

Reference: RFC 2445, 4.8.6.2 Repeat count

TEL

The basic problem: Open-Xchange only supports a fixed set of phone number fields, all of which have a semantic meaning (so they are not used to store other data). VCards, on the other hand, allow for a theoretically unlimited amount of phone numbers. In practice this is usually not much of a problem, but for all who are interested in the details:

  • The basic idea is that the first candidate for a field is stored there, the second one is
    • either moved into the second available field (in case of home1/2, business1/2 or other1/2)
    • or dropped in case the is no matching field available.
  • The marker "pref" in VCards, denoting a preferred adress, is ignored.
  • If no further information is given, the number is stored as work1

Other fields not supported

Appointments

ATTACH, COMMENT, CONTACT, CREATED, DTSTAMP, EXRULE, GEO, ORGANIZER, PRIORITY, RDATE, REQUEST-STATUS, STATUS

Contacts

GEO, KEY, LABEL, LOGO, MAILER, NAME, PRODID, PROFILE, REV, SORT-STRING, SOUND, SOURCE, TZ

Tasks

ATTACH, COMMENT, CONTACT, EXDATE, EXRULE, GEO, LOCATION, ORGANIZER, REQUEST-STATUS, RESOURCES, RDATE, URL

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