[nestes]

Very cool! Having written a couple of web calendars myself, I found that most of the hair-tearing logical complexity was due to recurring events. I didn't see any reference to recurrence when I skimmed the docs or the demo.

Have you decided how (or if) you're going to handle recurring events? Because that has huge implications for how otherwise "simple" changes to events behave, both from whatever backend you use as well as the UI.

[tomosterlund]

Thanks! This is a great question.

I intend to implement event recurrence, but this is definitely one of those things which will require changes across most packages of the project code. The details of how it will be implemented is still open :) Will surely look to other open source calendars for inspiration. Do you have any tips on solutions/APIs you like?

[Terretta]

> this is definitely one of those things which will require changes across most packages of the project code

While iterative development is the best way, there's something to be said for staring at a whiteboard full of the most common calendaring use cases, and being sure before starting the basics that the data model and code factoring "plan" support foreseeable uses, particularly "must have" ones.

This gets lost sight of in most Agile™ teams, maybe even more so than with solo-dev.

One way to do this in a reasonably light and OSS-friendly way is to pre-write the essential features README for the tool (event recurrence is an essential calendaring feature), then go through and mark them as TODO or blank checkboxes or etc., letting people contribute.

If you've architected the code structure a bit towards those things, the contributions / PRs are easier too, as the third party contributor isn't trying to refactor out from under everyone.

[jrm4]

"Remind" calendar has been a daily driver for me for the better part of a decade, you might find some inspiration there? I could see these two things working well together?

https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/

[nestes]

Long answer incoming, recurring events plagued me for more time than I'd care to admit. I'm perfectly happy to clarify anything I've expressed poorly.

a) I had full control of the back-end, so my solution was ultimately fully custom -- I don't have any APIs to point to, sorry.

b) Look at the iCalendar specification if you haven't already if for no other reason than to see what kinds of crazy corner cases they were expecting to support.

c) Generally speaking, making recurring series of events ('recurrence sets' or 'rsets') is "easy", but altering rsets will make you want to kick a small animal. I'm just going to throw out a couple of examples to indicate how annoying this can be.

Assuming each event is in a rset. 1) I move an event on a week calendar from Tuesday to Thursday. Is there an event in the rset in the preceding week that should now be visible on my calendar? 2) I move an event in a series recurring on T/R from T->R. Is the set now R/Sa or is it still T/Th? 3) Do I permit changes to a single event while still allowing it to be a member of its recurrence set (iCalendar allows this!)? More to the point, do subsequent changes of that rset affect the event that you've now changed? 4) I move event from a T/R rset to a Friday. Does it even exist anymore? It's not on a Thursday or Tuesday after all (not joking!). And there are so many "gotchas" of this variety.

Granted, a lot of this complexity will be the job of the backend, for which you may or may not be responsible. But you still need to affirmatively decide if you're going to ask the user if they want to make a ("this"/"this and following"/"all") type of edit on certain actions and what an action maps to in terms of the API you're using. And if you ever want to implement your own backend, you're locked into that decision and you might hate yourself later.

As for my personal solution (again, I was writing the backend): Most calendar implementations of recurring events (if the iCalendar specification is followed) comprise a "base" event and a recurrence rule from which the other events may be calculated. I personally settled on a much more rudimentary solution where each event was initially calculated via a recurrence rule but was stored a first-class entity in my database. I also prohibited changing the recurrence rule of for a set of events that was already created. This made it so that the recurrence rule actually had no semantic meaning besides at creation. The individual events were linked in a "group" and things like drag and drop operations were done just by computing the time delta and shifting each individual event by that amount. I NEVER regretted making my calendar "dumber" and almost always regretted making it more clever.

A last word of warning -- if you do not know precisely the "specification" you want to achieve in terms of what actions are permitted on rsets, you are 100% going to rewrite it multiple times (ask me how I know :p).

[tomosterlund]

This is gold for me. Thank you so much for taking the time!

Will be sure to actually do a word-by-word reading of the spec before taking on recurrence x)