Protocore Conundrum #17

At long last I have fixed the weather on Protocore as well as here. Next up, the Protocore Calendar. I have the original Outlook sync program which was written in 2001. Its exporting my appointments into a mysqldump file and uploading that to the server via FTP. It then hits a url on Protocore with my Protocore account name and password triggering the import into the protocore events database.

A problem is that its missing recurring appointments. Checking the original code I see why. I didn’t even use that field in the Outlook Calendar Item Object.

“No Prob.”, I think to myself, “I’ll just add that field.”

Visual Studio 7 is a thing of the past, and bringing the project into Visual Studio .NET brings some problems - namely the Inet OCX that so many of my windows-based projects depend on, is no longer in VS .NET. Ok so I will just try to put together the export piece and worry about transfer later. So I start to do that and its going well and I get to the recurring field.

In the new Microsoft Outlook Appointment Item Object Model, recurring is just a flag. There is also the recurring pattern which has other objects including recurring.type. This is starting to get more involved at this point.

I had planned to convert the mySQLdump FTP process to an XML push. .NET is famous for that right?

However one thing that I’ve also done is convert Outlook calendar to ical format for other calendar integration. For that I used a public domain script and its kind of a pain because its not automated and its very manual. I have to do the export, then import it into kde kalendar or whatever app.

So here is my conundrum - should I proceed to rewrite the Outlook export keeping Outlook’s object model and updating the Protocore events system with the recurring field…..OR…..do I convert Protocore evens to ical format and write an automated ical XML push out of Outlook?

Each way seems to be about the same amount of work, but I think ical has more possibilities and would enable Mac and Linux people (and enlightened Windows people using ical-based apps) to push their Protocore Calendar into their apps and vice versa.

However since I use Outlook for work my main use is around Outlook. Also the new codeweavers crossover office product allows (finally!) you to run Outlook 2003 in Linux or Mac.