Retaining Events from the user's calendar

2
votes

I'm working on an App that needs to remember events selected by the user from their calendar and I've run into a problem with recurring events.

For non-recurring events I can just store the eventIdentifier and fetch the event from the Event Store when I need it.

But recurring events all share the same eventIdentifier. When I go back to the Event Store to fetch the event (based on the eventIdentifier) I get the very first event in the recurrence chain ... not the Nth recurrence of the event that the user selected.

I can't persist the user selected events by archiving the entire EKEvent object since EventKit doesn't support NSCoding.

I'm considering storing the eventIdentifier and Start & End dates so that I can fetch the correct event from the Event Store ... but that seems pretty kludgy and might make tracking changes the user makes in their calendar between launches of my App tricky.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

1
iphoneioseventkit

1 Answers

0
votes

The event identifier alone is not enough even for non recurring events. Indeed, it can change when the user moves the event to a different calendar. For recurring events, it may change upon detaching an occurrence or splitting the recurrence.Therefore, it is common practice to search for events using a subset of information (say title, start and due date). You should not rely on event identifiers.

Unfortunately, the framework does not provide us with the raw data of an event, it just provides all of the occurrences of the events in a specified interval. Therefore, there is no such thing (using the framework) as the possibility of retrieving a single recurring event and then expanding its recurrence to get its n-th occurrence: you need to manually post-process the retrieved events in order to find the ones you are interested to.

The problem here is that the APIs provided are not meant for sync purposes. Many developers have complained and still complain about this by filing a bug/feature request using Radar. Until now, Apple answer about is that the APIs fulfill a different purpose, since sync is automatic. However, this is true when syncing through iTunes, but not programmatically.