[geeklog-devel] Calendar Plugin - Recurring Events

[Anthony Rowles]

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Samuel Leathers <sam at theleathers.net> wrote:
> I think having a bunch of columns for recurring events could get real
> ugly. My other thought was what if we mirror the ical structure in the
> database like so:
>
> columns: dtstart, dtend, rrule
>
> And then write an ical class with a parser for displaying calendar
> events. This could be slow (I don't know), but what if we augment this
> ical backend in the database with a cache?

I'm also writing a proposal for the calendar plugin, and I'll get into
this in more detail there, but my design uses this approach for
calculating recurring events - except I plan to do that work in the
client (free scaling!).  It'll almost certainly be faster than having
the server do all the computations, and at the very least the wait
time will occur after the page has loaded, giving the user something
to look at while they wait for the events to populate, instead of
staring at a blank page.

I plan to store recurring events in a separate table, but with one
additional field, a list of "exceptions".  When the client requests
events for a range (say, April 2010), it gets a set of single events
for that range, and a set of recurring events that might fall in that
range (based on dtstart/dtend).  It then generates all instances of
the recurring events that take place within the range it's currently
displaying (in this case, April 2010), and adds those to its event
list.  If the user wants to change one instance of a recurring series
(say, move next week's weekly meeting back one hour because of a
conflict), we convert the event to a "single event", add it to the
non-recurring table, and add the date/time to the list of exceptions
for its parent recurring series.  You just have to maintain a link to
the parent in the database so you can delete the newly spawned "single
events" if the user later wants to delete the entire recurring series.

Here's a really great paper on the topic that describes a flexible way
to write a recurring event parser (what he calls "temporal
expressions"): http://martinfowler.com/apsupp/recurring.pdf.  His
examples are in Java but I think it can be done just fine in
JavaScript.  Using unions/intersections/differences between sets, you
can create really powerful and complex recurrences (every 3rd week in
the summer, etc) fairly easily.

- Tony