Appointments synced from CalDav default to "Play a Sound"

[LinuxUser]

I recently installed Evolution to be able to share appointments with someone using Apple Calendar. The set-up of CalDav synchronization was easy and worked immediately, so thanks for all the work that’s gone into that so far!

There’s only one minor thing that I was hoping to tweak a bit. When a new appointment is created in Apple Calendar, and is set-up with a reminder like “Alert 15 minutes before” or something, it gets synchronized to Evolution with a reminder that defaults to “Play a sound 15 minutes before”. I was hoping that there was some setting that would allow this to be configurable, as I would much rather have synchronized appointments use “Pop up a reminder 15 minutes before” instead of just playing the beeping sound.

I’m currently using Ubuntu 22.10 and Evolution 3.46.1-0ubuntu1 (installed via apt).

Thanks!

[mcrha]

Hi,
I’m afraid that’s what the Apple Calendar defaults to. The CalDAV
calendar does not add reminders on its own and the default reminders
setting in the Evolution does mean “pop up a reminder” not “play a
sound” and, more importantly, it affects only newly created events in
the Evolution itself.

You can verify what the server has stored (and what it sends to the
evolution-data-server) when you run:

CALDAV_DEBUG=1 /usr/libexec/evolution-calendar-factory -w

from a terminal (the actual path can differ in your distribution), then
open Evolution, add an event in the Apple Calendar, then right-click
the calendar in the Evolution and pick Refresh. I suggest to use some
unique (or easily distinguishable) summary for the test event, thus you
can easily locate it in the log output. The text between BEGIN:VALARM
and END:VALARM is the reminder definition. It looks like the following
for the “pop up reminder” type:

BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:reminder text
TRIGGER;RELATED=START:-PT10M
END:VALARM

Yours might have different ACTION value, I believe.

Bye,
Milan

[LinuxUser]

I ran the command that you suggested and was able to get the following definition for the alarm:

< BEGIN:VALARM
< X-WR-ALARMUID:A35EDE94-860B-4141-B25F-EBC9EC365C3B
< UID:A35EDE94-860B-4141-B25F-EBC9EC365C3B
< TRIGGER:-PT5M
< ATTACH;VALUE=URI:Chord
< ACTION:AUDIO
< END:VALARM

So it’s definitely an “AUDIO” alarm type that Apple Calendar is creating. I don’t mind having the audio alarm, but having a notification as well would be great (similar to how Apple Calendar does alerts). I wonder if I could modify what Evolution receives from Apple Calendar by creating a simple plugin for Evolution?

[LinuxUser]

I’ve done a bit of experimentation, and I think that I may be able to hack together a Python script using SyncEvolution to switch AUDIO alerts to DISPLAY notifications. I can manually update alerts as follows:

sudo apt install syncevolution
syncevolution --print-databases
mkdir need_new_empty_dir
syncevolution --export need_new_empty_dir backend=evolution-calendar database=<some_id_string>

Then I edit one of the files in the need_new_empty_dir directory, and copy that to a new directory named to_update. Then I can update that one appointment in Evolution with:

syncevolution --update to_update backend=evolution-calendar database=<some_id_string>

I’ll post the script here if I get something that works.

[LinuxUser]

In case anyone’s curious, I did throw together a Python script to modify the reminders in my Calendar. Here’s the code:

import os, sys

CALENDAR_IDS = ["Put your ID from --print-databases here"]

WORKING_DIR = "/tmp/calendar_reminder_fix_working"


def get_modified_event(lines):
    needs_modification = False
    modified_event = []
    event_summary = ""

    in_vevent = False
    in_valarm = False

    for l in lines:
        if l == "BEGIN:VEVENT\n":
            in_vevent = True
        elif l == "END:VEVENT\n" and in_vevent == True:
            in_vevent = False
        elif l == "END:VEVENT\n" and in_vevent == False:
            print("ERROR: Found END:VEVENT outside a vevent block")
        elif l == "BEGIN:VALARM\n":
            in_valarm = True
        elif l == "END:VALARM\n" and in_valarm == True:
            in_valarm == False
        elif l == "END:VALARM\n" and in_valarm == False:
            print("ERROR: Found END:VALARM outside a valarm block")
        elif l.startswith("SUMMARY:") and in_vevent == True and in_valarm == False:
            event_summary = l[8:].strip()
        elif l == "ACTION:AUDIO\n" and in_vevent == True and in_valarm == True:
            needs_modification = True
            modified_event.append("ACTION:DISPLAY\n")
            modified_event.append(f"DESCRIPTION:{event_summary}\n")
            continue
        elif l == "ATTACH:Chord\n":
            continue
        modified_event.append(l)
    return needs_modification, modified_event


if os.path.isdir(WORKING_DIR) == False:
    os.mkdir(WORKING_DIR)

for cal_id in CALENDAR_IDS:
    EXPORT_DIR = os.path.join(WORKING_DIR, f"export_{cal_id}")
    UPDATE_DIR = os.path.join(WORKING_DIR, f"update_{cal_id}")

    if os.path.isdir(EXPORT_DIR) == False:
        os.mkdir(EXPORT_DIR)

    if os.path.isdir(UPDATE_DIR) == False:
        os.mkdir(UPDATE_DIR)

    os.system(f"syncevolution --export {EXPORT_DIR} backend=evolution-calendar database={cal_id}")

    files = os.listdir(EXPORT_DIR)
    print(f"Found {len(files)} files for calendar ID {cal_id}")

    total_needing_modification = 0
    for f in files:
        with open(os.path.join(EXPORT_DIR, f)) as fin:
            lines = fin.readlines()
            needs_mod, mod_event = get_modified_event(lines)
            if needs_mod == True:
                total_needing_modification += 1
                with open(os.path.join(UPDATE_DIR, f), 'w') as fout:
                    fout.writelines(mod_event)
    print(f"Found a total of {total_needing_modification} events that needed updating")

    os.system(f"syncevolution --update {UPDATE_DIR} backend=evolution-calendar database={cal_id}")

It seems to work so far, but I still haven’t tested it extensively, so use at your own risk!