PeopleSoft/Calendar Integration

Last week three different people asked me if it was possible to integrate PeopleSoft with a calendar management program (Microsoft Outlook, to be specific). Whether you are trying to create appointments for HRMS Enterprise Learning classes, ELM training classes, or eRecruiting interviews, the solution is the same. Since most calendar programs support the iCalendar (ics) format and since iCalendar files are text files, we can generate appointments from PeopleSoft IScripts and serve those as file downloads. As a starting point, we can copy the event example from the iCalendar RFC:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T035959Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Modifying this a little, we can convert it to an HTML object with bind parameters:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//My Company//PeopleCode vCal 1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:%Bind(:1)
DTEND:%Bind(:2)
SUMMARY:%Bind(:3)
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

We can serve this text to a client browser using an IScript that looks something like:

Function IScript_GetICalendarEvent
   Local DateTime &startTime;
   Local DateTime &endTime;
   Local DateTime &tempTime;
   Local string &startTimeUTC;
   Local string &endTimeUTC;
   Local string &eventTitle;
   
   REM ** TODO: Initialize date and title variables from database;
   
   REM ** change time zone to your time zone;
   &tempTime = DateTimeToTimeZone(&startTime, "PST", "UTC");
   &startTimeUTC = DateTimeToLocalizedString(&tempTime, "yyyyMMdd'T'HHmmss'Z'");

   &tempTime = DateTimeToTimeZone(&endTime, "PST", "UTC");
   &endTimeUTC = DateTimeToLocalizedString(&tempTime, "yyyyMMdd'T'HHmmss'Z'");

   %Response.SetContentType("text/calendar");
   %Response.WriteLine(GetHTMLText(HTML.ICAL_EVT, &startTimeUTC, &endTimeUTC, &eventTitle);
End-Function;

All you have to do is fetch your event data from the database and provide your users with a means to access this IScript. If you want your users to be able to access this IScript from a workflow event, then modify your e-mail workflow template to include a link to this IScript. Likewise, if you want your users to be able to download a calendar event from a page, add a link for this IScript to that page. When creating a link to this IScript, be sure to include all the keys required to fetch the event's data from your database.

If you study the iCalendar RFC, you will notice that it also includes a specification for tasks. You could modify this example to add tasks for voucher due dates, etc. I'll leave the possibilities and implementation to your imagination.

This example is only meant to be a starting point. Since iCalendar support has many potential uses in PeopleSoft, I would create a reusable App Class API for rendering iCalendar (ics) files.