iCal events showing dahed line border

When the even is white with a dashed line around it that means that whoever manages the online calendar has been invited to attend the event. When they click on the event online they are asked if they are "Going?" and need to click a radio box for "Yes", "Maybe", or "No". Once they have checked a radio box and iCal updates the event in iCal changes back to the right color.

If you don't want to go through this process when you edit an event in iCal you can, under the "Invitees" section click the little white down arrow on the invitee and click "Remove Invitee". This will automatically update the event online without the online administrator having to accept the change as well as keep the color of the event in iCal the same.

I also got the wrong background/dashed border symptom for an event that I created on my company's Exchange server via web access (because that's the only way I could check the meeting room availability), and then got a mixture of accepts from Windows and Mac users amongst the invitees, plus a few that didn't reply. This was under Lion (OS-X 10.7), so the new iCal didn't fix the problem either.

I found I could fix it by exporting the event as an .ics file, editing it manually and then re-importing into iCal. These were the steps:

1. Click "Mail Event" from the iCal entry's context menu

2. In the mail that appears, right-click the .ics file attachment to open it with TextEdit

3. Edit the non-repliers' entries to read "PARTSTAT=ACCEPTED" instead of "PARTSTAT=NEEDS-ACTION"

4. Also remove the ";RSVP=TRUE" from the end of their "ROLE=REQ-PARTCIPANT" entries

5. Save the file somewhere

6. Double-click it to import it into iCal

That resulted in the problem calendar entry getting overwritten with one in the correct color and without the dashed border. This would be tedious if you have a load of such problem entries, but OK if like me you have only the one.

In the light of tim_west007's comment on what the dashed border line means, I took another look at this - i.e. I deleted the event and started again from scratch. I should mention that my iCal is not connected natively to my company's Exchange Server because they're still using the 2003 version which iCal doesn't support. Instead I connect to the server from Mail using IMAP, my iCal isn't connected to any server calendar, and I always have to import iCal events manually by double-clicking them in the e-mails.

So, like I said starting from scratch, I opened my sent objects in Mail and found the invitation which the Exchange Server sent out when I created the event. I double-clicked the .ics attachment to import it into iCal, and got the white dashed border. When I opened the event in iCal, my name wasn't amongst the invitees and I there were no buttons to press to accept the event. Then I took a look at the .ics file in TextEdit, and saw that in spite of what I'd seen in iCal, my name was indeed amongst the list of people from whom a response was expected - i.e. I saw this entry:

ORGANIZER;CN="Moss, David":MAILTO:<my mail address>

ATTENDEE;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;PARTSTAT=NEEDS-ACTION;RSVP=TRUE;CN="Moss, Dav

id":MAILTO:<my mail address>

I changed my entry to this:

ORGANIZER;CN="Moss, David":MAILTO:<my mail address>

ATTENDEE;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;PARTSTAT=ACCEPTED;CN="Moss, David":MAILTO:<my mail address>

Then re-saved the .ics file and double-clicked it to import it into iCal again, and this time I got it without the dashed border and in the correct background color. No other edits of the .ics file were necessary.

So I conclude:

1. The dashed border indicates that the person who sent out the invitation didn't reply yet

2. The fact that this can happen at all seems to be some poorly thought out programming in Exchange Server (why would anybody need to reply yes or no to their own invitation?)

3. iCal doesn't provide any means to fix the situation, since it doesn't include the inviter amongst the list of invitees even if the .ics file says it should. Therefore you have to edit the .ics file manually.

I'm not sure if this will help anyone, but I have been doing some CalDav/iCalendar development, specifically syncing an Exchange calendar with my Yahoo calendar. I noticed that all the events in Yahoo that were imported via my app from Exchange had the dotted border, and events created directly in Yahoo on the same calendar had a solid border. After examining every aspect of the VEVENT records, I noticed that the border style changed depending on the format of the UID value. Events with a UID created from a Microsoft GUID had the dotted line, as did events with an UID starting with a number. At first I thought it might be the dash character in the UID, but events created in the Yahoo calendar also have dashes in them, but the format looks slightly different from what a GUID string value looks like.

So, it seems like the format of the UID affects the border style in certain calendar applications, but I haven't quite figured out what the rules around it are.

Hope this helps.