Page MenuHomePhabricator

Allow commenting on imported calendar events
Open, WishlistPublic

Description

We use Phabricator's Calendar primarily for recording meeting agendas and minutes. We don't use Calendar for the scheduling of these meetings, because:

  • Some recurring events cannot be created in Calendar itself (eg. "Repeat meeting monthly at the first Monday of the month").
  • A lot of users prefer to schedule meetings using their phone or other OS-native calendar app that's already part of their workflow.

Importing via ICS URL from Google Calendar seems like a good solution for this, except that it's not possible to add comments (i.e. meeting minutes) to imported events.

Now I understand that event details have to be read-only, because Phabricator won't be able to sync any changes back to the original Google Calendar. I'm not an expert on the ICS format, but as far as I know it cannot store 'comments' for an event. Theoretically this would mean that comments could be enabled for imported events, as Phabricator wouldn't be able to export comments back to ICS anyway.

Event Timeline

epriestley triaged this task as Wishlist priority.Apr 10 2017, 11:04 AM
epriestley added a subscriber: epriestley.

This is technically possible (and I believe imported events do have some support for mutation within Phabricator today: for example, I believe you can award them tokens). However, I'm very hesitant to start making imported events writable.

One reason is T11800: if two users separately import an event, we currently import two copies of it. This is somewhat resolvable but necessarily has some weird cases around policies and destroying imports.

Another reason is that we really destroy imported events (that is, actually delete the data). This simplifies things like fixing mistakes, but becomes a problem if we're potentially destroying comments.

I'd much rather make it easier to schedule events in Calendar so that Calendar has the master, writable copy of events in these situations. For example, we could expand the "recurring event" UI to support "the first monday of every month" events. Calendar should already be fairly usable on phones, but maybe there are things we could do to improve this. T8057 also discusses schedule-via-email.

Fair enough. I think that if "on the $nth $weekday of the month" and "on $weekday every $x weeks" were to be supported, we would technically be able to schedule all events in Calendar. Do you know if support for this already planned somewhere, or should I create a new feature request?

Go ahead and create a new request -- knowing which things people actually want/use will be helpful since other calendaring applications seem to have very complex controls here without much consistency and with different supported sets of capabilities.