The high-level framework

Overview

The high level ical feed-generating is supplied by the ICalFeed class. To create a feed, write a ICalFeed class and point to an instance of it in your URLconf.

With RSS feeds, the items in the feed represent articles or simple web pages. The ICalFeed class represents an iCalendar calendar. Calendars contain items which are events.

Let’s look at a simple example. Here the item_start_datetime is a django-ical extension that supplies the start time of the event.

from django_ical.views import ICalFeed
from examplecom.models import Event

class EventFeed(ICalFeed):
    """
    A simple event calender
    """
    product_id = '-//example.com//Example//EN'
    timezone = 'UTC'
    file_name = "event.ics"

    def items(self):
        return Event.objects.all().order_by('-start_datetime')

    def item_title(self, item):
        return item.title

    def item_description(self, item):
        return item.description

    def item_start_datetime(self, item):
        return item.start_datetime

To connect a URL to this calendar, put an instance of the EventFeed object in your URLconf. For example:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url, include
from myproject.feeds import EventFeed

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # ...
    (r'^latest/feed.ics$', EventFeed()),
    # ...
)

File Downloads

The file_name parameter is an optional used as base name when generating the file. By default django-ical will not set the Content-Disposition header of the response. By setting the file_name parameter you can cause django_ical to set the Content-Disposition header and set the file name. In the example below, it will be called “event.ics”.

class EventFeed(ICalFeed):
    """
    A simple event calender
    """
    product_id = '-//example.com//Example//EN'
    timezone = 'UTC'
    file_name = "event.ics"

    # ...

The file_name parameter can be a method like other properties. Here we can set the file name to include the id of the object returned by get_object().

class EventFeed(ICalFeed):
    """
    A simple event calender
    """
    product_id = '-//example.com//Example//EN'
    timezone = 'UTC'

    def file_name(self, obj):
        return "feed_%s.ics" % obj.id

    # ...

Property Reference and Extensions

django-ical adds a number of extensions to the base syndication framework in order to support iCalendar feeds and ignores many fields used in RSS feeds. Here is a table of all of the fields that django-ical supports.

Property name iCalendar field name Description
product_id PRODID The calendar product ID
timezone X-WR-TIMEZONE The calendar timezone
title X-WR-CALNAME The calendar name/title
description X-WR-CALDESC The calendar name/title
method METHOD The calendar method such as meeting requests.
item_guid UID The event’s unique id. This id should be globally unique so you should add an @<domain_name> to your id.
item_title SUMMARY The event name/title
item_description DESCRIPTION The event description
item_link URL The event url
item_class CLASS The event class (e.g. PUBLIC, PRIVATE, CONFIDENTIAL)
item_created CREATED The event create time
item_updateddate LAST-MODIFIED The event modified time
item_start_datetime DTSTART The event start time
item_end_datetime DTEND The event end time
item_location LOCATION The event location
item_geolocation GEO The latitude and longitude of the event. The value returned by this property should be a two-tuple containing the latitude and longitude as float values. semicolon. Ex: (37.386013, -122.082932)
item_transparency TRANSP The event transparency. Defines whether the event shows up in busy searches. (e.g. OPAQUE, TRANSPARENT)
item_organizer ORGANIZER The event organizer. Expected to be a vCalAddress object. See iCalendar documentation or tests to know how to build them.

Note:

  • django-ical does not use the link property required by the Django syndication framework.

The low-level framework

Behind the scenes, the high-level iCalendar framework uses a lower-level framework for generating feeds’ ical data. This framework lives in a single module: django_ical.feedgenerator.

You use this framework on your own, for lower-level feed generation. You can also create custom feed generator subclasses for use with the feed_type option.

See: The syndication feed framework: Specifying the type of feed