arnaudq's blog

Disconnect between icalendar and iTIP mandatory properties

Never noticed it before iTIP validation was added to ical4j but there is a disconnect between the mandatory properties specified by iCalendar and the ones specified in iTIP REQUESTs.

For VEVENT, the SUMMARY is mandatory in iTIP REQUEST but not in iCalendar.

For VTODO, the DTSTART, PRIORITY and SUMMARY are mandatory in iTIP REQUEST but not in iCalendar.

In the context of the new CalDAV scheduling draft where automatic scheduling takes place as soon as a calendar resource has an organizer and attendees, this implicitely means that those calendar resource should also have the iTIP mandatory properties.

For SUMMARY and PRIORITY, client implementers can always add them with a value of null and 0 respectively but for DTSTART, this is more problematic.

When assigning a task to somebody else, it is possible (and actually quite likely) that one would set the DUE date and not the DTSTART.

Posted at 03:09PM Jan 16, 2009 by arnaudq in CalDAV  |  Comments[1]