Tonight, I wanted to plan my schedule for the forthcoming Agile 2009 conference in Chicago. I very much look forward to the conference and can hardly make up my mind, which sessions I want to see – because there will be so many I will miss. Planning requires some form of organization, and the conference webpage offers to download iCalendar files to import the sessions into your calendar. This is a great idea, but doesn’t work if you either live in a different timezone that Chicago, or use Outlook as your calendar. My assumption is that one of the two criteria will match most conference participants, which really makes me wonder how well tested the calendar file feature on the webpage is. Anyway, I took a dive into the specs of iCalendar and wrote a little Groovy script to convert the available calendar files.
>> All sessions are converted and available for download, ready to be imported into your calendar.
There were two problems with the original files. Here’s one example:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:Agile2009 METHOD:PUBLISH CALSCALE:GREGORIAN X-WR-CALNAME:Agile2009 X-WR-CALDESC:Agile2009 BEGIN:VEVENT UID:1220 DTSTART:20090825T140000 DTEND:20090825T173000 SUMMARY:User Stories for Agile Requirements LOCATION:Columbus IJ URL;VALUE=URI:http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/node/1220 DTSTAMP:20090209T022940Z LAST-UPDATED:20090723T173948Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR
Timezone
The start and end time contains no timezone information. The iCalendar specifies that if you postfix that time with a “Z”, it means that the time is UTC. So the transformation is simple: add five hours to convert Chicago time to UTC, and append a “Z”.
Outlook
The second problem becomes apparent as soon as you import your second session. On the first import, Outlook outmatically creates a new Calendar “Agile2009″. Nice. When you import your second session, it goes again into a new calendar “Agile2009 (1)”. You get the pattern. To fix it, you have to remove the X-WR-CALNAME and X-WR-CALDESC properties. This seems to be a common problem with Outlook. But luckily, this is also easy to fix.
Groovy
To automate the conversion (and scrape all calendar files from the Agile 2009 conference webpage), I wrote this script. I’m sure it still can be optimized. What I really love is the String handling with negative indexes and easiness of regex handling, it makes these kind of tasks so much easier 
public class ConvertCalendar{ private static final String VCAL_TIME_FMT = "yyyyMMdd'T'HHmmss"; public static void main(def args){ // use the smartphone page to get all valid session numbers // http://agile2009.pairwith.us/sessions InputStream sessionStream = new URL("http://agile2009.pairwith.us/sessions").openConnection().inputStream String sessions = org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils.toString(sessionStream); List calList = new ArrayList(); // href="/sessions/5107" sessions.eachMatch(/href="\/sessions\/\d{1,4}"/) { InputStream calendarStream = new URL("http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/session_ical/" + it[16 .. -2]).openConnection().inputStream String calendar = org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils.toString(calendarStream); File calendarFile = new File("./cals/temp - calendar.ics"); def calendarFileWriter = new FileWriter(calendarFile) def calendarFileName = ""; calendar.eachLine { def vCalLine = it; if (vCalLine ==~ /^X-WR-CALNAME:.*/ || vCalLine ==~ /^X-WR-CALDESC:.*/) { // ignore that line } else if (vCalLine ==~ /^DTSTART:.*/ ) { def origDate = Date.parse(VCAL_TIME_FMT, vCalLine[-15..-1]) vCalLine = vCalLine[0..-16] + DateUtils.addHours(origDate,5).format(VCAL_TIME_FMT) + "Z"; calendarFileWriter.write("${vCalLine}\n") calendarFileName = origDate.format("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HHmm"); } else if (vCalLine ==~ /^DTEND:.*/) { def origDate = Date.parse(VCAL_TIME_FMT, vCalLine[-15..-1]) vCalLine = vCalLine[0..-16] + DateUtils.addHours(origDate,5).format(VCAL_TIME_FMT) + "Z"; calendarFileWriter.write("${vCalLine}\n") } else if (vCalLine ==~ /^SUMMARY:.*/) { calendarFileName = calendarFileName + " " + vCalLine[8..-1].replaceAll("[^\\w\\s]", "") println "Processing " + calendarFileName calendarFileWriter.write("${vCalLine}\n") } else { calendarFileWriter.write("${vCalLine}\n") } } calendarFileWriter.close(); calendarFile.renameTo(new File("./cals/"+calendarFileName+".ics")) calList.add(calendarFileName+".ics") calendarStream.close(); } println "Text to paste into Wordpress after uploading: " println "<ul>" Collections.sort(calList) calList.each { println "<li><a href="\">${it}</a></li>" } println "</ul>" }}
category: 
What a brilliant idea. Thank you!
This is awesome. Entourage will sync my iPhone and I’ll know exactly when and where I need to be.
There are a few 404 links for the calendars. I only know of the ones I’m interested in, so here they are.
- 2009-08-24T1400 Advances in Release Planning .ics
- 2009-08-26T1100 Done Are We There Yet.ics
- 2009-08-26T1445 How to run 45 Million tests per day and why.ics
- 2009-08-26T1600 Reducing Test Maintenance A Picture is Worth 1000 Tests.ics
- 2009-08-27T1400 How to identify and fix problems using Value Stream analysis and A3 thinking.ics
Thanks for doing this, very helpful!
Hi Ryan, thanks for the hint! It should be now fixed, can you try again? Problem was with session titles, that contained some special characters.
Yep, they work now. Thanks again!