[Orgmode] Re: iCal export and complex diary sexps

[Dan Griswold]

On 15 Jul 2010, address@hidden wrote:

> There was a thread about this some weeks ago. The iCal export does not
> support org-diary-class entries or other complex diary sexps.

I missed that thread, but it's an issue I looked into some time ago,
with regard to sexps. The basic issue is that org-export-icalendar-*
calls icalendar.el, which currently does not support the export of
complex sexps.

In other words, it doesn't do much good for us to say that Org ought to
export these things to ical, because the feature is missing not from org
but from a completely different package.

I, too, wish the feature was available. But there's no point in
complaining here about it. I hope that Ulf Jasper (the author of
icalendar.el) is working on this problem. The package appears to
be in active development, but I can't confirm that.

So, assuming the best, others are working on what is truly not a trivial
problem. I looked at the ical specification, and it made my brain
hurt. It is very complex to program in a conversion of sexp to the ical
format. I'd rather that Carsten and others working actively on org-mode
not be distracted by a puzzle that is really not central to org's
functionality or purpose.

Perhaps org-explort-icalendar could (for the elisp savvy) easily support
org-diary-class, but at this stage, with the limitations of
icalendar.el, it would only be elementary support, because the function
appears to be a nifty way of specifying what (diary-block) does, but
without the option of "skip". To program in more than this gets us right
back to the fundamental problem, the lack of the needed feature in
icalendar.el.

> I want to ask if anybody has a workaround on this issue in the
> meantime. For example, it could possibly be solved by an
> after-export-hook that scans org-files for org-diary-class, converts
> the relevant entries to the iCal format and appends them to the ics
> file.

My way of handling this was to create a file with certain important
recurring events in ical format (these happen on the second Tuesday and
the second Thursday, those good sexp candidates). I have a function that
appends this file to the file icalendar-export-file creates, and have
all this tied in by a function called by after-save-hook. Something
similar, I'm sure, could be done for org-export-icalendar-*



-- 
--------------
Dan Griswold
Rochester, NY
--------------