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Database design - recurring events

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 2:02 pm
by Luke
I'm giving my event calendar application a pretty major overhaul. I want to allow for recurring events, but I'm not sure how to go about this in my database design. How would you guys go about it? Any ideas would be great.

Normally for this, I'd simply download an open-source PHP calendar and look at how they did it, but they all seem to want me to pay for them... :?

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 4:05 pm
by Kieran Huggins
the iCal standard has recurring events built in - and it would probably be the most convenient method to implement for compatibility reasons.

You can download Mozilla Sunbird and create various recurring events to test what it does in iCal format, but I'm sure there's a spec on the net somewhere as well.

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 4:44 pm
by Luke
wow great idea... I had considered outputting to iCal format as a feature, but I hadn't thought of iCal as a storage medium. Thanks

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 5:19 pm
by Kieran Huggins
You might have better performance designing your event database table after the iCal standard rather than simply storing your events as an iCal file... I smell a class brewing ;)

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:08 pm
by Luke
this whole iCal thing is proving pretty difficult. Has anybody else every tried doing something like this? I can't decide whether to try and emulate the ical standard in a database, or to just store my events in ical files... neither seem any easier than the other. :?

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 12:59 am
by Kieran Huggins
Maybe http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar will help? Just aiming to include the info in iCal in your scheme would make it iCal compliant.