Boundary Conditions

Before writing, I assumed that I would need to refer any reader to the introductory post of this series on adding events to secondary calendars. Depending on your skill level and experience that may still be true, and it definitely is true if you want to understand what you are doing, but if you just want to get it done, you can probably muddle through with the following instructions.

Here’s the really short story: when you call the insertEvent method, you pass the event that you are creating and optionally, the edit url of the calendar where you want the event to appear. So, to create an event on a secondary calendar, just pass the edit link of the calendar. (You can get the edit link of a calendar in python by calling GetEditLink().href on it.)

For the longer story, I’ll assume that you have installed Python, ElementTree and the Google Data Python Library, following Google’s instructions.

Run through the tests and the sample code. When I ran the calendarExample.py it failed with this stack trace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 577, in <module>
    main()
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 574, in main
    sample.Run(delete)
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 498, in Run
    self._PrintAllEventsOnDefaultCalendar()
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 99, in _PrintAllEventsOnDefaultCalendar
    print '\t\t\t%s' % (a_participant.attendee_status.value,)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'value'

Since all I wanted to do was to make this sample code run for the single case of adding an event to a secondary calendar, I commented out line 99, but the code should be checking that there is an attendee status before writing its value. After that change the sample code ran fine for me.

To insert a single event in a secondary calendar, I copied calendarExample.py to secondaryCalendarInsert.py. Then I commented out everything in the Run method except this line:

503

    see = self._InsertSingleEvent()

and made the following change,

266
267

new_event = self.cal_client.InsertEvent(event, 
  '/calendar/feeds/g5b79g3f2bi5hc1it41seuu41c@group.calendar.google.com/private/full')

This instructs the InsertEvent method to create the event in my secondary calendar by POSTing to the url of my “Secondary Calendar” (id g5b79g3f2bi5hc1it41seuu41c@group.calendar.google.com) instead of my primary calendar (id default). I found the calendar ID on the calendar settings page of the calendar, but as I said above, if you have accessed a calendar programatically, you can just call GetEditLink().href on it to get the proper link.

You can see that a “One Time Tennis with Beth” event was inserted beginning at the moment I did the insert and lasting for one hour, as described in the sample code.

[Update 2008-11-14: You can't see this if you are using Safari. In general embedded calendar's show in Safari, but there is something about this particular calendar that causes it not to display. Google does a number of separate calls and redirects to obtain the correct data for this calendar and it looks like one of the calls returns data that doesn't correspond to the mime-types. The point that I was trying to communicate with this illustration was that the event did in fact appear and that it was on the secondary calendar.]