Java Calendar Tools

Table of Contents

About Java Calendar Tools

k5n Java Calendar Tools is a project to provide Java-based tools and components that will leverage industry standard calendar protocols (iCalendar in particular). There seems to be a lack of open source tools for using these protocols, and it slows adoption of the protocols. For example, the CAP protocol does not seem to be supported by and calendar applications.

Overview of Components

There are currently two main components that comprise the Java Calendar Tools:

k5n-ical: This library provides a simple API for parsing/importing and writing iCalendar-formatted data.
k5n-CalendarPanel: This library contains a Swing GUI components for displaying a “month-at-a-glance” display of events. You can see an example of this on the k5nCal Screenshots page.

License

All software is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

For more information about this license:

GNU GPL Frequently Asked Questions

This license means that you are free to use this software in other open source applications. If you are interested in using this software in something that is proprietary (not open source), then please contact us with details of your request. In most cases, we will be happy to provide you with a suitable license.

Plans

Currently implemented:
- Parse iCalendar VEVENT files into objects
- Export VEVENT objects into iCalendar data
- Provide JUnit tests to validate parsing/importing and exporting
- Provide API to query loaded iCalendar objects
- Add support for VTODO and VJOURNAL
- Add support for VTIMEZONE (and all the various timezones)
- Provide parsing of Outlook CSV files so we can create a csv2ical utility (which there is a need for)
- Add support for VATTACH, allowing inline attachments which are saved either within the iCalendar data or include a URL to an external file.
Long-term plans
- Support for xCal-Basic
- Support for iTIP (RFC 2446)
- Support for iMIP (RFC 2447)
- Support for CAP (RFC 3283)

Tutorial

The Event object holds a single ical event and corresponds to the VEVENT iCalendar object.

Typically, the ICalendarParser object is the container for the ical data. (You can override this by creating your own class that implements the DataStore interface. If not, the ICalendarParser class will handle all storage of iCalendar data.) It includes an API for querying events for specific categories and/or time ranges.

Parsing an iCalendar File

 import java.io.File;
 import java.io.BufferedReader;
 import java.io.IOException;
 import java.util.Vector;
 import us.k5n.calendar.ICalendarParser;
 import us.k5n.calendar.Event;
 import us.k5n.calendar.Todo;
 
 // ...
 
   ICalendarParser parser;
   File icalFile = new File ("/tmp/example.ics");
   try {
     BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new FileReader (icalFile));
     parser.parse (r);
   } catch (IOException e) {
     // ... report error
   }
   r.close ();
   Vector events = parser.getAllEvents ();
   for (Event e : events) {
     System.out.println ("Event: " + e.getSummary () ;
   }
   TodoList todo = parser.getAllTodo (); // get to-do entries
   for (Todo t : todo) {
     Todo t = (Todo) todo.elementAt ( i );
     System.out.println ("Todo: " + t.getSummary ());
   }
 // ...

Screenshot

The CalendarPanel class is a Swing UI component that can be used to display the typical month-at-a-glance calendar view within a Swing application.

Download

There is now a 0.5.0 release available.

Download the latest version form:

Github

Developer Resources

Tutorial on using the tools
Github resources:
Be sure to check out the Links page where there are links to relevant standards like iCalendar (RFC 2445).
Sample iCal data to use for testing
iCalendar test data from the Reefknot project