Lost Wiki calendars after upgrade to 10.6.4

Mr Beardsley wrote:
The fixed worked, and now iCal does not change the URL to the _uid_/guid version. If you make the change you do need to stop and restart your iCal service and then open up the iCal client and re-enter the Server path: for people that couldn't connect.

Andre,

I am curious though why originally the wiki calendars didn't get a proper principals/ _uid_/guid URL that pointed to a valid calendar location?

If by "originally", you mean "from 10.6 through 10.6.3", it's due to a fix in iCal in 10.6.4, which exposed a server bug around calendar home path handling. Prior to 10.6.4, that bug was 'dormant' and allowed the group calendaring 'hack' to work.

-dre

FWIW: I gave feedback at:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ical.html

and filed a bug report at:
http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/

Let's hope this gets fixed by Apple ASAP. I'm leery of doing the change suggested by Andre LaBranche1 at:
http://trac.calendarserver.org/changeset/5775/CalendarServer/branches/release/Ca lendarServer-2.5-dev
since I may need punt all over again after Apple makes the next change...

Mr Beardsley wrote:
Andre,

I will for sure try this fix. Thank you!

In trying to find a way for people to use a group calendar, I came up with the following process. I made a resource called departmentcalendar using the iCal Server Utility. I then found the following link http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3897 and used the calendarserver manageprincipals to make members of a group read/write delegates for that resource calendar. I was able to connect to the resource calendar fine using iCal and create events.

This is conceptually similar to another easier and equally supported way of getting a 'group calendar', and that is to add a dummy user account, then configure delegation for that account. It's marginally easier than what you described because you can do it all from iCal without having to resort to the command line tool.

My question is, if we make the code change you suggested above, would it be better (or possible using the calendarserver manageprincipals utility) to make people delegates of the wiki calendar?

Not really. The wiki calendar is special in that it's not owned by a real calendar principal (e.g. you can't invite it to a meeting), and so accordingly isn't a valid target for delegate configuration. Wiki group calendars can be considered to be the result of an agreement between a calendar server and a wiki server.

Good to hear that the code change is working for you!

Cheers,
-dre

Thanks Andre, the fix works very well!

I think this form of group calendaring should be fully supported by Apple. During the 10 months we've been using it, it has worked consistently well over iCal and iPhone and it's a very important feature for small businesses or for organisations like mine that are very "mobile", meaning people that need to know each other location and availability on the go.

Once again thanks for your help

CS8

Hai Andre!

Thanks for the patch! I applied to to the respective file copy-paste, yet I still have the same problem with the not found UID in iCal-Client (4.0.3) which is rewritten from either

/principals/ _uids_/wiki-groupname/
/principals/wikis/groupname/

once I close iCal client and reopen it. While I change it in the Settings and leave iCal open, it remains in a well state.

All other clients (iPhone, Web-Wiki, Outlook Connector) work just fine.

Regards and appreciate your help

Andi

I noticed this too, not sure why.
Perhaps the 10.6.4 client murks around with the path and not just the server.

Either way, Apple should allow us to actually add a group account in iCal client. And not a user account that has to be edited with anther path... A customer of us now cannot use his school group calendars anymore because of this!!

As a last resort... Maybe we should all downgrade to 10.6.3.

Unfortunately, the patch doesn't work for me either (Server 10.6.4, Client 10.6.4) and it looks like the url returned by joinURL is the same whether the line is in the original or the patched location.

I know the following is a very ******** work-around, but it seems to work for me, so unless somebody more knowledgable comes up with a better solution and you don't have too many group calendars, this might help:

In the same file, /usr/share/caldavd/lib/python/twistedcaldav/directory/principal.py, before the "self._url = url" in line 534 add lines like these for each of your group calendar accounts:

if url == "/principals/ _uids_/fancy-hex-number-your-ical-client-gives-you/":
url = "/principals/ _uids_/wiki-groupname/";

Then, if you restart the iCal server and change the URL in your iCal client back to the wiki-groupname format, it works (even after restarting the iCal client).

ct181,

now this made the day for our admin! I gave him a weekend call and he implemented - as you said - this **hack for the 6 group calendars we use ... DONE!

In the client the nomenclature for the wiki-calendar (better don't call it "group"!) is always /principals/ _uids_/wiki-groupname/ no matter which you used to add the calendar to iCal.

Now we're looking forward to a real fix of what has now been there for so long ... supported or not, but for sure customary!

Regards

Andi

ct181 wrote:
Unfortunately, the patch doesn't work for me either (Server 10.6.4, Client 10.6.4) and it looks like the url returned by joinURL is the same whether the line is in the original or the patched location.

It should work, and has worked for others in this thread... so maybe there is an error in your process. Make sure to not only move the line, but change it as shown, as well. Restart iCal Server after making the edit. You may need to delete and re-add the account in iCal, or at least manually edit the path to be the 'correct' value if it has already been changed.

HTH,
-dre

Andre, you are right, I totally overlooked the "change the line" part of the patch (and looking at it now, only moving it does not make any sense, of course). Thanks for pointing that out again, everything works fine now without manually hacking the URLs in.

By the way: Why are there stars in my first post...? I meant to write that it is a very under-developed work-around, now it looks like I used a swear word...

I think I found a solution to fill in the iCal prefs:

/principals/ _uids_/wiki-groupname/

This works for me on my 10.5 computers as well as on my 10.6 computers

We should Award Apple with the Rotten-Apple Award!

Thank you Andre, Problem solved by editing the principal.py file. hipp hurray!:)