What URL's do I use for 'webcal' publish/subscribe, with Mozilla Lightning/Sunbird, Apple iCal, etc.?

The Basics

If you have WebCit v6.80 or newer, you can use the simplistic but effective "webcal" protocol to connect calendar clients such as Mozilla Sunbird, Apple iCal, Evolution, etc. Basically, this means you use WebDAV to access and store and ical calendar file.

Caveats / Warnings

When you perform a webcal/webdav "publish" operation, any calendar items already existing in the room will be deleted, and replaced with the calendar items you are publishing. Be sure that this is what you want to do. The typical user (or more accurately, the typical client side calendar program) will subscribe to the calendar, edit it locally, and then publish the modified calendar back to the server.

Accessing your account's main Calendar room

These URLs assume that you can reach your Webcit login screen via:

  * http://citdomain.com/

When publishing or subscribing your calendar on a Citadel server, you can use any of the following URL's -- they all point to the same calendar:

  * http://citdomain.com/groupdav/Calendar/
  * http://citdomain.com/groupdav/Calendar/ics
  * http://citdomain.com/groupdav/Calendar/calendar.ics

In the above examples, the word "Calendar" is the name of the primary calendar room for your Citadel account. That's the room you can access via the menu on the left, when you login as a user to your citadel groupware.

Depending on the application you are using, a dialogue should pop up and ask your for your login credentials.

Accessing other rooms that have a Calendar View

You may replace that with the name of any other calendar room to which you have access, for the same effect. For example, if you have a room called "Meetings" on the "Main Floor", you would use this URL:

  * http://citdomain.com/groupdav/Meetings/

Free / Busy

If your client supports free/busy lookup of other users via HTTP, point that function at this URL:

  * http://citdomain.com/freebusy/

(This assumes that your client will append the name of the user being queried to this URL.) By the way, Citadel automatically publishes free/busy data based on the contents of your calendar -- you don't have to configure your client to do this manually.

Testing

You can test wether you use the correct URL easily by entering it into your browser. Simply log in to your webcit instance with your username and then try the url. Your browser should automatically download a calendar file with .ics extension.

Application specific hints

Subscribing in read/write mode with Apple iCal/Calendar

In short: You can not subscribe to a calendar and write to it directly. But it works if you do the following.

  - Download your webcit calendar.ics file via the appropriate URL with your browser.
  - Import this calendar.ics into your iCal/Calendar app as a local calendar and name it.
  - Now publish this local calendar to your webcit using the same URL you used to download the ics file.
  * Publish as: calendar (the .ics extension will be added automatically by iCal/Calendar)
  * URL: As mentioned above, something like http://citdomain.com/groupdav/Calendar/
  * Username: Your Citadel User
  * Password: Guess what...
  * I am not entirely certain about the remaining options, I marked them all and it is working for me