appointment frequency questions

[sdouglass]

I'm working on migrating some custom calendar data out of a SQL database and into Zimbra. I have a question about the appointment frequency options, though. From what I can tell so far I'm not sure I'll be able to reproduce in Zimbra some of the frequency options that we have in our custom calendar.

The options are to have an event recur on a specific day or days of a specific week of every month, eg. the first Monday of every month, the second Tuesday and Thursday of every month, etc.

I see ways of specifying that an appointment recur on specific weekdays of every week of the year, or that an appointment recur on specific weekdays of specific weeks of the year, but it doesn't look to me like there's a way to have appointments that recur on specific weekdays of specific weeks of the month. Am I misinterpreting the docs and code?

[KevinH]

Talked this over with some folks. iCalendar allows each event to have multiple recurrence rules, but we don't support that on the server side today. Having said that, your specific example can be expressed in a single recurrence rule. Such a complex rule cannot be displayed in the client's custom recurrence dialog though.

A workaround is to define multiple meetings with duplicated attendees and other info. For example, create one meeting that recurs on first Monday of each month, another meeting that recurs on the second Tuesday of each month, another that recurs on the second Wednesday of each month, and so on.

[sdouglass]

Setting up multiple similar recurring appointments will be good enough, I think. The number of appointments we have that are for Tuesday+Thursday or Monday+Wednesday+Friday etc. is pretty small. If you do add server-side support for multiple recurrence rules, though, that'd be great. Anyway, thanks for the quick response and the great product!

[sdouglass]

I've got another question. I'm creating an appointment over SOAP, and I'm trying to set up an appointment that recurs on the 2nd Wednesday of every month, for example. Here's some of the XML that I'm sending:

<m>
<su>SOAP test appointment</su>
<inv loc="2000 Main St., Emeryville, CA 94608" name="SOAP test appointment" type="event">
<s d="20060306T220000" tn="(GMT-08.00) Pacific Time (US &amp; Canada) / Tijuana"/>
<dur h="2"/>
<or a="sdouglass@myserver.com" d="My Name"/>
<recur>
<add>
<rule freq="MON">
<byday>
<wkday day="WE" ordwk="+2/>
</byday>
</rule>
</add>
</recur>
</inv>
</m>

When I log in and check my calendar I see the original appointment showing up on the correct day, with the correct start/end times. The recurring instances are showing up every month on the same day of the month as the original instance, though. (Not on the second Wednesday of every month.) When I edit the recurrence for the series, I see the following:

Repeat:
Monthly
Day 6 of every 1 month(s)
[selected] The first Sunday of every 1 month(s)

This seems to happen no matter which day of the week and which week of the month I try to use. Am I doing something wrong, or is there a bug here? I couldn't find anything in Bugzilla that corresponded to this but maybe I didn't use the right search terms? Is anybody else doing this same thing? If so please share some tips.

[sdouglass]

Nevermind! I figured out that the problem was the "+" in my ordwk attribute. I misinterpreted the docs and thought that had to be there, but after checking the xml the Web client uses, I noticed that it was not putting the "+" in.