Calendar User Agent

Calendar User Agent is the term applied to any application implementing support for the iCalendar and associated interoperability specifications. Until now, iCal4j provided support for creating, parsing, and validating iCalendar objects but didn’t provide the full functionality required to implement a Calendar User Agent.

With the next release iCal4j improves support for the iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP), by providing User Agents to make it easier to interact with other CUAs.

User Agents

There are User Agent implementation for each of the components support by the iTIP protocol, with each agent implementing the applicable iCalendar methods. The User Agent will ensure the appropriate properties are set at both calendar and component-level, providing a simpler and more consistent approach to calendar interoperability.

Method Transformers

Behind the User Agent implementations are Transformer implementations for each of the iCalendar methods. Each transformer applies the necessary transformations to the specificed iCalendar object to meet the requirements of the iCalendar method interaction. These transformers may be used independently of the User Agents, offering more flexibility to choose how to implement iTIP support.

Examples

The following examples demonstrate some of the use-cases for User Agents.

Publish an event

When publishing an event the user agent will ensure the calendar METHOD property is set to PUBLISH; each event UID exists; and each event ORGANIZER is set to the current user.

VEventUserAgent userAgent = ...
ContentBuilder builder = ...

Calendar calendar = userAgent.publish(builder.vevent {
	summary 'Spring Equinox'
	dtstamp()
	dtstart '20090810', parameters: parameters { value 'DATE' }
	action 'DISPLAY'
	attach'http://example.com/attachment', parameters: parameters { value 'URI' }
});

Initiate a meeting request

VEventUserAgent userAgent = ...
ContentBuilder builder = ...

Calendar calendar = userAgent.request(builder.vevent {
	uid '1'
	summary 'Spring Equinox'
	dtstamp()
	dtstart '20090810', parameters: parameters { value 'DATE' }
	action 'DISPLAY'
	attach'http://example.com/attachment', parameters: parameters { value 'URI' }
	attendee 'mailto:organizer@example.com'
});