Using vObject

[Joshua Gardner]

I'm brand new to USENET so please bear with me.

I'm writing a specialized to-do list app. I'm using Django but this is
not a question about Django. It has to have recurring tasks set by the
managers for the employees to then check off.

I've got pretty much everything in the app worked out, except for one
thing: the repeating tasks. I want to have it so that the manager puts
in a repeating task with a description and a repeat rule. This rule then
generates simpler one-time tasks. These one-time tasks have a
description, a time (a datetime.dateti me object) and "completed" boolean.

I've looked around and think I have these options:
1. Manually put it all together with another Django model that
implements the repeat rules.
2. Do the same thing but use dateutil.rrule to help.
3. Use the icalendar (http://codespeak.net/icalendar/) module to access
ICS files.
4. vObject (http://vobject.skyhouseconsulting.com/) to do the same.

I think I want to use vObject because it uses dateutil and the
management can easily manage tasks from a desktop app.

Only thing is that I find vObject's documentation very cryptic and was
wondering if anybody here could shed some light on how to use vObject. A
simple "getting-started" tutorial or something similar would be nice.

Thanks all!

-Josh

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Re: Using vObject

Joshua Gardner schrieb:

I'm brand new to USENET so please bear with me.
>
I'm writing a specialized to-do list app. I'm using Django but this is
not a question about Django. It has to have recurring tasks set by the
managers for the employees to then check off.
>
I've got pretty much everything in the app worked out, except for one
thing: the repeating tasks. I want to have it so that the manager puts
in a repeating task with a description and a repeat rule. This rule then
generates simpler one-time tasks. These one-time tasks have a
description, a time (a datetime.dateti me object) and "completed" boolean.
>
I've looked around and think I have these options:
1. Manually put it all together with another Django model that
implements the repeat rules.
2. Do the same thing but use dateutil.rrule to help.
3. Use the icalendar (http://codespeak.net/icalendar/) module to access
ICS files.
4. vObject (http://vobject.skyhouseconsulting.com/) to do the same.
>
I think I want to use vObject because it uses dateutil and the
management can easily manage tasks from a desktop app.
>
Only thing is that I find vObject's documentation very cryptic and was
wondering if anybody here could shed some light on how to use vObject. A
simple "getting-started" tutorial or something similar would be nice.

I think you are going down a wrong route here. I have implemented a
reservation management application for a museum in TurboGears - and
while I use icalendar to support ICS-based viewing of the reservations,
I completely manage * store them based on my own model.

In case of the recurring events, I have one master-event, that defines
the start & recurrence-options.

I then create child-events that essentially are write-protected (all
editing goes to the master), and serve only as place-holder. But if you
want, you can "detach" them, to make them live on their own.

The reason for this is simple: if you want to display views of your
tasks based on e.g. a specific day, you can query the database. Simple
queries will yield a list of tasks needed.

Whereas all ICS-based approaches listed above, including vObject, would
mean that you

- extract *all* the ics-data from the database, not really knowing if
there is anything relevant in there for the current view

- potentially expand the events in there, manually or through some
methods the libraries expose

- filter the results.

All of this is going to consume much useless time.

So I would suggest you use approach 1, possibly 2 (don't know rrule).

Diez