DAViCal and support for Apple's CalDAV client in OS 10.5

Published on Friday, the 2nd of November, 2007 and last updated on the 7th of December, 2007
Quite a few people seem impressed with the new release of Leopard, and are now looking for a CalDAV server to use with their shiny new iCal app. Unfortunately it seems that Apple wrote this primarily to work with their own (free, open-source) calendar server, which has the side effect that it doesn't work with DAViCal.Part of the "doesn't work" is due to DAViCal not implementing some areas of the CalDAV specification, which is fair enough. Part of it is due to DAViCal not implementing some draft extensions to the CalDAV specification, which I can also understand, since it allows them to provide some useful features that those extensions are designed to support. There also seem to be some parts of the "doesn't work" which are due to a dependence on extensions beyond either of these cases, which is a little more disappointing - and quite a bit harder to implement.So far I have made some fixes to the first point, and some additions towards parts of the second, but as of today it still does not work. This is complicated by my not having access to a Mac. Things are looking up, however, because Tom Robinson has kindly agreed to loan me a Mac running Leopard from next week.In order to "clear the slate" for that, I will be releasing a 0.9.2 over the weekend with the various minor enhancements and fixes that have been applied over the last week. So although this upcoming release will let you add your DAViCal account to iCal 3, it still won't actually work with it. I'm hoping that ready access to the application will enable me to correct that fairly quickly.Also waiting in the wings (and which unfortunately won't be in 0.9.2 either) Maxime Delorme has been working on SyncML support, and is nearly ready with a patch, so we can look forward to that addition fairly soon also.

Quite a few people seem impressed with the new release of Leopard, and are now looking for a CalDAV server to use with their shiny new iCal app. Unfortunately it seems that Apple wrote this primarily to work with their own (free, open-source) calendar server, which has the side effect that it doesn't work with DAViCal.

Part of the "doesn't work" is due to DAViCal not implementing some areas of the CalDAV specification, which is fair enough. Part of it is due to DAViCal not implementing some draft extensions to the CalDAV specification, which I can also understand, since it allows them to provide some useful features that those extensions are designed to support. There also seem to be some parts of the "doesn't work" which are due to a dependence on extensions beyond either of these cases, which is a little more disappointing - and quite a bit harder to implement.

So far I have made some fixes to the first point, and some additions towards parts of the second, but as of today it still does not work. This is complicated by my not having access to a Mac. Things are looking up, however, because Tom Robinson has kindly agreed to loan me a Mac running Leopard from next week.

In order to "clear the slate" for that, I will be releasing a 0.9.2 over the weekend with the various minor enhancements and fixes that have been applied over the last week. So although this upcoming release will let you add your DAViCal account to iCal 3, it still won't actually work with it. I'm hoping that ready access to the application will enable me to correct that fairly quickly.

Also waiting in the wings (and which unfortunately won't be in 0.9.2 either) Maxime Delorme has been working on SyncML support, and is nearly ready with a patch, so we can look forward to that addition fairly soon also.

Just to tell you ...

Submitted by Luis Matos (not verified) on 2 November 2007 - 12:01pm.

Just to tell you ... bongo-project.org has an caldav server :P

caldav in bongo

Submitted by andrew on 2 November 2007 - 10:55pm.

I heard that it's being written in PHP first, and then translated into python, but it's progressing well in spite of that.

:-)

Cosmo

Submitted by mikeal (not verified) on 2 November 2007 - 9:32pm.

Here is a list of bugs we have logged to keep track of iCal3 interop work on Cosmo after the Leopard release.

http://tinyurl.com/2jpm5w

A quick summary.

- If you have spaces in the actually collection name that has to be escaped in the url, iCal3 FLIPS OUT. We're talking malformed HTTP requests, it's kind of impressive to watch really.
- When creating collections, iCal3 does some ACL requests that break and then it flips out.

One that isn't logged, is that if you add the account in Leopard, and hit the delegation tab, it does some request that fails and then the entire account becomes unusable and you have to remove it and add it back.

The caldav support in iCal3 is buggy to say the least, but since it's the first big caldav client out there we're doing all we can to work around these bugs, I hope you can leverage the testing work we've done in DAViCal. Cheers :)

-Mikeal

Go iCal go!

Submitted by Jens (not verified) on 3 November 2007 - 5:16am.

Hi Andrew,

I just want to show you my support for getting your RSCDS – Really Simple CalDAV Store compatible to the latest iCal version of OSX Leopard. I have also just installed Leopard here on my OSX machines and I am waiting to get my hands on a compatible RSCDS version. I already have a RSCDS installation that seems to work with at least Thunderbird-Lightning. However, I do have the issues you just mentioned and I would love to see a RSCDS version that is fully compatible to iCal3 as well. So if you need OSX testers, here I am! ;-) Just drop a note when you have your modifications ready and I will update my RSCDS installation and see if it works...

cheers,
jens

If you need ical 3.0...

Submitted by Axel (not verified) on 3 November 2007 - 10:16pm.

... i can give you remote access to my mac. Please contact me and we can talk about the posibility to do this. I entered my emailadress ;-)

cheers,
axel

SyncML would be nice if it worked with Nokia or SE...

Submitted by John Jones (not verified) on 6 November 2007 - 10:07am.

that would make it useable right now all the data I really see is on my mobile !

ical support

Submitted by Johannes (not verified) on 22 November 2007 - 8:33am.

any horizons on the ical3/rscds roadmap yet? if you need client testing please send me some login data for a server and i would really like to test it.

kind regards from austria.

DaviCal

Submitted by Francesco Cicala (not verified) on 23 November 2007 - 8:23pm.

Hello,
I could help with the italian translation and with testing the Apple client.
By the way, there are hard drive images of OS X running on x86 around the net / you might grab one to test its client.

I am about to install your package on an Ubuntu 7 server.
Cheers,
Francesco.

PROPFIND/PROPPATCH to / with iCal

Submitted by GlowingApple (not verified) on 27 May 2008 - 5:20pm.

Hi, I have been playing with DAViCal recently using iCal on Leopard for the client. I am using version 0.95 and have one issue with it. A quirk in iCal sends a PROPFIND followed by a PROPPATCH request to the server root (/) upon every calendar addition and deletion. It doesn't seem to matter where DAViCal is hosted, the requests always go to /. The calendar is created/deleted successfully, but sending a PROPFIND/PROPPATCH to / triggers a 403 error and iCal pops up a dialog box to report it.

I discovered that the PROPFIND/PROPPATCH requests were being sent to caldav.php and it was throwing a 403 error to the PROPPATCH request (in caldav-PROPPATCH.php in response to a disallowed write property). I'm not sure how iCal's seemingly unnecessary PROPPATCH request should be handled. I'm not sure when this error catch would become a necessity, but I found that replacing the 403 error with a success code solved the problem for the moment.

If anyone has any suggestions on how something like this could be properly handled in the code I'd be happy to test it out. In the meantime, I have a fully functioning DAViCal server and am easily syncing my calendars between my laptop and desktop. Thanks for the great software!

Current status of iCal 3 and SyncML in DaviCal?

Submitted by Rolf (not verified) on 12 June 2008 - 3:17am.

Hi,

just curious to learn what the current status is regarding support of syncML and iCal3? I really would like to use DaviCal as central calendar store for Lightning, Evolution, Apple iCal and my Nokia N95 so any info greatly appreciated. If I can help testing, please let me know. Tomorrow I'll get my Mac OS X 10.5 upgrade package, and I can help testing SyncML as well.

/rolf

iCal3: yes, SyncML: no

Submitted by andrew on 2 July 2008 - 11:34pm.

DAViCal will certainly work OK with iCal 3, although there's further work to be done, and I no longer have access to a Mac, so pre-release testing by people who do will be useful.

There is a patch against a feature request on sf.net to provide SyncML support. The problem is it pulls in a large chunk of another project, which needs to be turned into an external dependency, so it needs substantial refactoring, and I have no devices that SyncML applies to, myself, so it's Somebody Else's Itch :-)

Cheers,
Andrew.

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