I just discovered your iCal Filter earlier today have been testing it out this evening. While the filter creates ICS files that can be opened by my iCal application just great I set up folder on my website to test it with PHP iCalendar. While PHP iCalendar works great with the ICS files that were created with my iCal application when I upload files created with the iCal Filter script the PHP iCalendar give me a page in my browser saying:

There was an error!
Invalid calendar file. Please try a different calendar.
The calendar "./calendars/Test.ics" was being processed when this error occurred.

Any ideas as to what might be going wrong or how I can trouble shoot this?

Right now the only workaround is to create the file via iCal Filter. Open it in iCal. And then go to the Calendar folder inside Library and load the ICS calendar file that I find there that iCal itself created.

I'm thinking maybe there is a minor error in the syntax of the file created by iCal Filter that iCal works through but trips up PHP iCalendar????

Jerrald,

I can think of one possible problem that is related to the OSX platform.

By default, when creating files on OS X, the tab delimited format uses Macintosh type line endings, which are not compatible when served by PHP iCalender, which might reside on the same machine that FileMaker creates the file. There are two ways to correct the line endings to the proper (Unix) type that is compatible with web servers.

a.) Upload the file via FTP as text, which will transfer the file and convert the line endings to the proper type.

b.) Convert the line endings using a text editor that handles this. BBEdit, available for OS X, is capable of converting these. Open the file in BBEdit, and from the window's drop down lists, select the one that looks like a file, and set the bullet to Unix. Save the file, and now it will be compatible on with PHP on the same machine.

If this does not help, let us know and we can explore it further. If you can give us the platform and applications you are using it may help us trouble shoot it better.

Thanks Court for such an unbelievably quick reply.

The platform and applications I was working under are FM 5.5 running on a OSX 10.3.4. I then uploaded PHP iCalender and the iCal Filter created ICS file to a Unix server via Dreamweaver MX.

I'll try looking at this again this afternoon.

Jerrald,

I am not sure if Dreamweaver counts as FTP'ing it or not. let us know the results of your test this afternoon.

A brief update Court I just tried uploading the iCal Filter created document using some other Mac FTP clients and I still got the error so I don't think this is a Dreamweaver FTP problem although I do remember years ago having exactly that problem with Dreamweaver and GoLive where they weren't uploading perl script files as text and I had to use another FTP client (Fetch at the time).

Well I'm gonna keep playing with this because I think this is just such a kool FileMaker idea. I do however want to get this down though so I can then look at the other kool files I downloaded from your site too. You've given me a lot of good ideas for things I can work on and possible ways I can recommend your products to other FileMaker clients and users I know.

I guess I'll also have to test this from my Windows machine too.

Well here's one of the things I did this afternoon/evening.

In the Sample Data file I created two records that in the Description field I placed 1000 characters of Greeked text. I then Ran the iCal Filter and created my file SampleDataFriday.ics.

I looked in at that file (opened it with TextEdit) to look at it and I could see the Description field had no line breaks in it. The text was continuous. I uploaded the file and got the error message Invalid calendar file again when I went to the phpicalendar url.

So I took the iCal Filter created file and this time placed it in Library/Calendars in my users folder so iCal would open it as a Calendar rather than importing it. No problem opens just fine. I quit iCal and look at the SampleDataFriday.ics file in TextEdit again. This time it has line breaks. iCal has put in line breaks. Plus iCal has added a few of it's own fields; X-WR-RELCALID, DTSTART, and UID.

I upload that file and the phpicalendar url works fine and I see the calender(s).

But in addition to inserting those new fields I also noticed ical changed the order
in which the field appear.

In the iCal Filter created file the field order was:
BEGIN:
SUMMARY:
DESCRIPTION:
LOCATION:
DTSTART;
DTEND;
DURATION:
STATUS:
END:

In the Apple iCal generated file the sequence is
BEGIN
DTSTART
LOCATION
SUMMARY
STATUS
UID
DESCRIPTION
DURATION
END

There is no DTEND field. It's added UID and the sequence is different.

So I'm wondering if that could possibly be where the glitch is.

You see one of the other things I did was I took the same Apple iCal created file with the line breaks and opened it up in TextEdit again and this time I took out the 1000 characters of Greeked text that had line breaks and replaced it with the same 1000 characters with no line breaks. I uploaded it and it worked fine so that makes me think line breaks are not the problem.

What do you think?

Jerrald,

Thanks for the thorough post. I don't think field order is important for .ics files, apart from the headers and begin/end statements. I'll get a fresh installation going later today and see what I can tell you.

G'morning John I've been looking through the PHP iCalendar discussion forums this morning and while I'm not done searching I did find these topics that were similar to the problem I've encountered.

Error Message!!!!

Some issues...

Invalid Calendar File

Invalid calendar file? WTF?

Newbie config woes

Hi Jerrald,

As Court suggested, my testing seem to bear out that this is just an ftp issue and has nothing to do with the file format.

I have to switch my ftp client to ASCII (Text) mode in order to get our .ics file to load. With the ftp client set to auto-detect, the files fail to load just as you reported.

Plug: I'm using Transmit for ftp; if you're on a Mac it is absolutely awesome. Easily switch transfer modes, edit and chmod files over ftp: truly a cool app.

In any event, one interesting fact is that our new FM7 iCal export doesn't require things to be set to ASCII. Auto-detect just works with these files.

(Our FM7 iCal export is not yet available as a stand alone utility and is part of the Pro Version of CC Calendar.)

Hope that helps,

John

John Sindelar wrote:Plug: I'm using Transmit for ftp; if you're on a Mac it is absolutely awesome. Easily switch transfer modes, edit and chmod files over ftp: truly a cool app.

Interesting using Transmit in ASCII mode this time it did work!

Thanks.

But does this mean that CuteFTP Mac doesn't work in text mode? Either with automatic detection programed to see .ics files as text (ASCII) or transfering manually as ASCII?

Plus there were two other FTP clients I tried it with too!