Hi,

I'm trying to get an already existing and functioning "Filemaker to iCal subscription" set up to work with Sunbird. However Sunbird gives the following error message when trying to subscribe :

"Une erreur est survenue lors du décodage d'un fichier iCalendar (ics) en
UTF-8. Vérifiez que le fichier, y compris les symboles et les lettres
accentuées, est encodé en UTF-8."

Which means that there is a decoding error of the ics file into UTF-8. Make sure that the file, including symbols and accented letters, is in UTF-8 code.

Any ideas on how to rectify this ?

Hi, I'm not completely sure which syntax you'll use, but FileMaker's XSLT pdf contains a description of how to add encoding options to the subscription URL. You can find the pdf named fms9_cwp_xslt_en.pdf here:

http://www.filemaker.com/support/produc ... ation.html

Sorry about being a bit of a nerd about all this.

I imagine that the function that needs to be introduced is the following:

fmxslt:url_decode(String value, String encoding) Found on page 69 of fms9_cwp_xslt_en.pdf

if my subscription address is :

http://myserver/fmi/xsl/vcal/ccical.xsl ... mresultset

Any ideas on how you how you would introduce fmxslt:url_decode

That would go in the XLST style sheet, but unfortunately I don't have any experience doing that kind of encoding. I was thinking more of using the encoding function at the end of p.94 like this:

http://myserver/fmi/xsl/vcal/ccical.xsl ... ptType=PG&–encoding=UTF-8&-find&-grammar=fmresultset

If that doesn't work you might ask the guys at myFMbutler who developed this subscribing concept; they've probably dealt with language encoding more than I have.

Well I'm still at a bit of a loss with this. The guys from myFMbutler first told me to consult this website
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435877
from which I was unable to glean any pertinant info. That's more a reflection of my ignorance than anything else. Then they suggested that it's problem that would be fixed with the next version of Sunbird. Yet just for the heck of it I installed their demo calendar and the corresponding stylesheet and that works perfectly well with both Sunbird and iCal, which would suggest that the problem is more likely in the ccical.xsl stylesheet, would it not ?

Could be; we use a slightly different approach than they do. At the same time, the error could be misleading. In Sunbird I get the UTF error when I try to access a password protected calendar *before* I'm asked for a user name and password.

(Wow. I can't get anything to happen with the new version of Sunbird: I get java errors instead of the UTF error.) You might try testing our calendar with just a very simple appointment to make sure the encoding problem isn't in the data. You can perform a find in the subscribe url so you only get the one simple record you're looking for.