Add event parameter instead of Delete (Nextcloud workaround)

[Jaxom99]

Hi Flozz,

Thanks for this amazing and useful work! I have a need due to Nextcloud limitation in calendar management, and I think this project could be a very (very) good starting point.

User need and Nextcloud limitation

I want to share a calendar of upcoming events (appointments) to a client, without revealing personal data contained in appointment's details.
But Nextcloud calendars cannot be shared with availability only. The efforts of the dev team now is to look into "Free/busy" options but at user's level, not calendar's.

The only option to fullfil the user need is : calendar full share via link (with details), then hide details on a per-event basis (setting in UI : if shared, show full / show as busy only / do not show).

Proposed workaround

To make the option practically viable (ergo not adding a manual step at every appointment's confirmation), I think we could have an automated run on all events of a calendar, to add/set visibility of all event to the desired state.
Then the share via link would only show what is needed.
Limitation : new events created without visibility settings would be public until next run of the script. But maybe we can automate this as well ?

Implementation forking Calcleaner

I think I have to dig around this file:

calcleaner/calcleaner/caldav_helpers.py

Line 82 in 1eb5842

event.delete()

To each event I would have to add "CLASS:CONFIDENTIAL" to mark as busy, or "CLASS:PRIVATE" to hide it from share.
Can you help me getting this done ? How would you approach this ?

I will also point NC community to this issue, just in case it raises interest.

Thanks again!
-- Jaxom

[Jaxom99]

From what I get from the (sparse) caldav documentation, it could be something like event.icalendar_instance.subcomponents[0]["class"] = "CONFIDENTIAL".
And you may even set up an input such as PUBLIC / CONFIDENTIAL / PRIVATE.

[flozz]

Hello,

CalCleaner is a graphical software that provides no way to do automation (a.k.a. scripting). I do not think it is a good base if you want to run automated updates of your calendars (cron, etc.).

Here is the first PoC I made to cleanup calendars:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

from caldav import DAVClient


# Informations de connexion au serveur de calendriers.
CALDAV_URL = "http://localhost:8080/remote.php/dav"
CALDAV_USER = "admin"
CALDAV_PASSWORD = "password"

# Date au-delà de laquelle les événements sont considérés comme trop vieux
# Ici il s'agit des événements qui ont plus de 4 mois (aujourd'hui moins 16
# semaines)
DATE_OLD = datetime.now() - timedelta(weeks=16)

# On ouvre la connexion avec le serveur
with DAVClient(CALDAV_URL, username=CALDAV_USER, password=CALDAV_PASSWORD) as dav_client:

    # On récupère le principal (objet « racine » du serveur)
    dav_principal = dav_client.principal()

    # On récupère tous les calendriers accessibles
    calendars = dav_principal.calendars()

    # On prend les calendriers un par un
    for calendar in calendars:

        # On affiche le nom du calendrier et le nombre total d'événements qu'il
        # contient
        print("Calendar: %s" % calendar.name)
        print("  Events: %i" % len(calendar.events()))

        # On récupère les vieux événements.
        # Comme il faut fournir un intervalle on récupère ceux entre le premier
        # janvier 1900 et la date calculée plus haut
        old_events = calendar.date_search(
            start=datetime(1900, 1, 1),
            end=DATE_OLD,
            expand=True,
        )

        # On en profite pour afficher le nombre de vieux événements qui seront
        # supprimés
        print("  Old events: %i" % len(old_events))

        # On supprime tous les vieux événements, un par un
        for old_event in old_events:
            old_event.delete()

Sorry for the French comments, it came from my blog post about CalCleaner:

• https://blog.flozz.fr/2022/08/09/calcleaner-jai-developpe-un-petit-outil-pour-supprimer-les-vieux-evenements-des-calendriers/

This script is probably easier to adapt to your needs and can be run using cron :)

[flozz]

I close this issue as it seems it is no more needed :)

[Jaxom99]

Indeed, I went the script way. Thanks for your reply and advices!