Export to calendar and address book apps

[john_roberts]

Earlier this week I uploaded a couple projects to Share that I've been sitting on for a while. They are both built from concept plugins I developed many years ago. Some of you may have been using them back in the days when customers could run concept apps in production, but they are no longer available. So I re-wrote them (just in case you had both) and deployed to the community for distribution.

* iCal ICS calendar file export - I originally built this when I was working on the Knowledge10 conference portal. All of the session events were stored on a ServiceNow instances and I wanted a way to export the events to my personal calendar app. It started as a simple download of ICS files that could be imported to a calendar client app. This is similar to the existing email notification with a calendar file. The biggest difference is that notification is a push of a single event. This export allows users to pull one or more records to their calendar. I couldn't stop there since I realized that things change and the Knowledge sessions occasionally move rooms or times. To handle this I added support for webcal subscriptions for supported calendar apps (most likely needs some tweaking for some calendar apps). You can easily configure to export to any record type in the system that has dates. The feature includes example field maps for change requests.

* vCard contact export - Once I was done with the iCal export, I realized it's the same concept to export person records as vCards. This allows users to export one or more person records (typically users) as a vcf file and import them into an address book application. Using the same field map concept as the iCal exporter, you can technically export any record as a vCard.

Line for the tour of the sausage factory forms here....

Both of these features leverage processors to capture the client request for a specific file type (similar to XML, CSV, EXCEL). Once the field maps are defined for a table, just add the appropriate file type (ICAL, VCARD) parameter to a URL to request the file. If you haven't worked with processors yet, these are relatively easy examples that demonstrate the flexibility for exporting data in a custom format. Don't be nervous, jump into those script includes and check it out.

I'd love to hear ideas you have for enhancing these exporters as well as other ideas you can think of for using processors.

Personal note: Please consider these my going away gift to the community as I'm taking a break for a while. I hope to see you around this space again someday. It's been so much fun being part of this amazing community since the very first implementation of forums back in early 2006 (when there were about 10 of us that we called a community).

Thank you all for the inspirations you've provided over the years. You made my job FUN and EXCITING!

[lawrence_eng]

Thanks for everything, John!

[bbarnard]

Thanks John!

[davemoulds]

Thanks John!!   I just implemented your solution on Istanbul and it worked great with just the slightest bit of modification in our environment.

[john_roberts]

Cool. I love when someone resurrects one of my old posts, and it's even better when it still mostly works.