[Kolab-devel] General XFB specification available?

[Christian Mollekopf]

On Wednesday 07 November 2012 15.39:41 Christian Hilberg wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> 
> In an effort to enable the Evolution PIM suite to use
> Kolab as a groupware server, the evolution-kolab team
> has created a plugin for Evolution [0].
> 
> The plugin has seen considerable functional polishing
> and extension for the 3.6 series of GNOME. Among the
> functional extensions is the ability to read and display
> extended free/busy information (XFB).
> 
> Some of the XFB (displaying) code needs to be incorporated
> directly into Evolution. That code is not yet published,
> but it will be shortly after receiving some more testing.
> 
> While talking with the upstream Evolution developers
> about how to best incorporate my work into Evolution,
> the question was brought up if there was any specification
> of XFB available on the net anywhere.
> 
> My searches so far have always led to Kolab sites or
> list postings, and aside from the Kolab storage format,
> specifying how XFB is stored on the Kolab server, I
> have not found anything else (like, e.g. reserving
> X-SUMMARY and X-LOCATION for the purpose of XFB in a
> vfreebusy icalendar property - but then again, X-*
> properties are vendor-specific ones).
> 
> The Evolution developers are concerned about making
> general Free/Busy code too much Kolab-specific, so
> if you could provide any pointers to general XFB
> information (wich I could e.g. reference in the
> code dealing with XFB), that would be very helpful.
> 

Hi Christian,

I don't think there has ever been any specification of XFB, it's indeed a 
vendor specific extension to iCal, as there is no existing feature of iCal 
with the same purpose.

For the Kolab Format 3.x, a specification is drafted here: 
http://wiki.kolab.org/Free_Busy#Kolab_Object_Storage_Format

There are XFB implementations in Kontact and Horde, but I'm not sure to what 
extent they were working and the format how XFB information has been stored 
was IMO not ideal (lot's of duplicated information, no link back to events 
from the period in the FB object), see the above link for what I think would 
be the right approach to implement that feature.

The KDE implementation is in kdepimlibs/kcalcore/icalformat_p.cpp (look for 
FreebusyPeriod), there should also be something in the Horde codebase.

I hope that helps, feel free to ask further questions.

With my best regards,
Christian

> Kind regards,
> 
> 	Christian
> 
> 
> [0] https://live.gnome.org/Evolution/Kolab
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