Import items to Calendar App from email

[Toreddo]

Hello readers,

I am making a web app for my father in law where his customers must be able to make an appointment with him. Currently, when his customers make an appointment he will get an email with the details and he has the ability to confirm it. Now i would like to know is it possible that i send a file as an attachment that he could download so that, that appointment automatically will be imported to his iPhone Calendar?

I have googled but couldn't find an answer.

Thanks!

Chris

 

[qnc]

sounds like a great app.


When your father-in-law accepts the appointment in his email. What does it do from there. My suggestion would to be to add some sort of functionality that when he accepts the appointment it sends a exchange type appointment to his calendar that in turn syncs to his phone.

for instance the client makes an appointment and an email is sent to your father in law. when he accepts the appointment the accept action then sends information directly to his syncing calendar, which syncs with his device. I know it is a round about way but this is the only way I could think of. I don't know how secure it would be.

I don't know what type of email platform you use. For instance Google sync is free. you could have the accept action send the appointment to his google calendar/exchange server and it will in turn sync to iphone.


I just don't think this is a functionality that is built in to the iphone. You would probably have jailbreak the iphone and write an app that will inject the accepted information directly into the calendar database.

 

[Toreddo]

Hi qnc,

He's using an IMAP server that comes with his webserver for his email, i beleive IMAP has a calendar functionality but i don't think that the webserver or imap on his webserver does support it.

If he accepts an appointment, the server runs a PHP script so everything is still possible from, i'd like to use Google's Calendar but after your reply i tried to find a way to only sync with a calendar instead of email, but there don't seems to be a way to do that.

Maybe i should just add an gmail account which isn't going to be used.

Thanks for your reply,

Chris

 

[qnc]

you do have to create a gmail account but you never have to use it for email.

I have a gmail account only for calendar function set for push and another gmail account just for email set to imap.

Since he is using his own imap server he should not have to use the email from Gmail. Also n the exchange settings on the iphone you can turn off the email and never get any notification of anything going to that mail box.

The calendar would automatically sync with push and he could still use his imap account.

Could a php script be written to log in to google calendar and perform the add function to the calendar? If that was possible the sounds like you may have a solution.

 

[Toreddo]

That sounds like the best solution. You can indeed add events with php, Google made an api for that.

http://code.google.com/intl/nl-NL/apis/calendar/data/1.0/developers_guide_php.html

Thank you very much with your help, i'll post how everything worked out when i got it to work