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_ics 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.

Note:

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