Maybe dumb question but I'm wondering how iCal clients query a remote calendar.
I've just created a little web service that generates an iCal file. This file is successfully interpreted by Google Calendar and Lightning (new Sunbird). But I'm not filtering on any range of time.
I imagine that Google and Sunbird clients gives parameters to filter on dates at least.
How can I know what are these parameters ? Is it part of the iCal RFC ?
Can someone point me to the good direction ?
When you are just 'subscribing', you're simply downloading the entire file and that's it. No filtering.
However, when you're talking about syncing, the place you need to look at is CalDAV.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4791
This is a WebDAV based protocol most major calendar applications use, and does do things like filtering on time ranges and 2-way synchronization.
Related
I am trying to build an application with Microsoft Cognitive Speaker Identification Service. But when I check it using its api some audio are not recognized correctly. I would like to know how much is the accuracy level of the service. Is there any way to improve it.
There are various things that can affect the accuracy of the identification e.g. Noise level, microphone quality, echo, etc.
To improve the performance in your condition, you can make sure the enrollment audio is recorded in the same conditions as the test audio (e.g. same microphone) and try to ensure that recording is done in a quiet environment.
It does work across multiple users and tried on different PCs/microphones.
I'd make sure that:
It is in a quiet room/environment
You are sending the audio correctly... (it is just byte array data, no additional encoding.)
Also check the header MediaTypeHeaderValue/content type, all request seem to be 'application/json' even though we send wav files.
Take care when mapping your users to the azure guids, and make sure you are using the correct ones. If you are using the SDK rather than API for profile creation and enrollment, there's no retreival of profile by id at the moment, I have done a workaround, to recreate the profile , and update the id in a database just before Enrollment. (the API doesn't need this though)
Also make sure you are using the latest API, (urls ending .../speaker/verification/v2.0/ etc... Some of the text independent features in the SDK are V2 only, and can fail verification becuse V2 stores profiles in 3 separate locations depending on the verification method.
Also check the profile was created/enrolled using the same verification method you are using to verify. try with a new profile if unsure.
Question
How can I access all contacts on a CommuniGate Pro Server?
Context
I need to migrate contacts from 70 email accounts stored on a Communigate Pro server. Since CommuniGate supports CardDAV, I decided to use this protocol rather than exporting the contacts manually from their web client, Pronto.
I have managed to access the CardDAV folders and to extract the vCards contained there. However, the problem is that not all of the contacts show up in CardDAV; in particular, the web client contains subgroups of contacts that are invisible in CardDAV.
When I export these subgroups from the web client, they are outputted as a txt file in a proprietary format called vCardGroup. Even though I wrote a PHP script to convert vCardGroup to vCard, using this method is still very slow.
I will be grateful if you suggest a way to extract these contact subgroups programmatically. I understand that CardDAV does not support subgroups, so I guess that the big question is: where are these txt files stored?
As a reference, please find here the result of a PROPFIND request on the root of the CardDAV folder. Note that CommuniGate seems to implement CardDAV via http://calendarserver.org.
Thank you for your attention!
After contacting the Communigate Pro (CGP) support team, I am able to answer my own question:
The only way to extract contacts programmatically from a Communigate Pro server is having root access to the server and use a protocol like XIMSS.
They also told me that CGP's support of CardDAV is limited, and does not include subgroups.
Since the server administrator is an evil man, I will have to extract the contacts manually using the web client, Pronto.
Just in case some poor soul is in my same situation, I provide a link to my script to convert the proprietary vGroupCard format (ie. BEGIN:VGROUP) to the standard vCard format (ie. BEGIN:VCARD).
Other than HTTP PUT and POST, what other methods can a web application designer use to allow users to upload content (either files or listbox text) from a page of his web app to a remote server?
On the same topic, I was wondering what technology/APIs does a service like Google Docs or Google Drive use? The reason I ask this is: Our Sys Admin has disabled file uploading (via Squid proxy), yet I was able to create and share a document using Google Docs / Google Drive.
Many thanks in advance,
/HS
EDIT Please see the strikeout above.
This depends on the server in question - as the standard set of HTTP commands can be expanded, and some may not be configured/allowed. One of the common commands is "OPTIONS" that ask "what can I do".
But to answer more helpfully: you generally have two main options:
POST (the one you probably want to user as it's nearly always avaiable
GET. You could use GET (but I'm NOT advocating it - just saying you could you it - you should not use a GET to make changes to the server). There are problems with this approach (including size of files, manually handling the encoding etc) but it's possible if you have to go this route.
PUT it often not enabled on servers for security reasons.
More reading: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html
Edit: if "file uploading" is prevented by proxy, have you tried encoding the POST? i.e. As opposed to sending a multipart POST, try encoding the files yourself into POST string and sending that instead? Or encode the file and split into multiple small posts and piecing them together at the other end?
Google Docs uses a mixture of POST and GET. POST for the updates. Google Drive I don't know.
I've a home-made php based web calendar which I would like my users to import into Google Calendar, iCal, etc. so they have up-to-date information available on their calendar of choice. I understand providing a webcal link is the way to go but I am not sure how to create it. I've donwloaded an example .ics file but did not have much info..
Where can I find more info on creating a webcal feed? Also, does webcal allow authentication? The feed will most likely be password protected.
Thanks!
A webcal feed use iCalendar format as defined in RFC 5545. It's a rather complex and cumbersome format. You'll find simple examples on wikipedia which may fit your needs. You could also opt to use a library to abstract the format, such as:
http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/laboratory/Zend_Ical/
http://bennu.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/icalcreator/
http://sabre.io/vobject/
From all of these the last one might be your best bet (all others seemed to be dead last time I checked).
As for authentication you may use basic HTTP authentication. Or use a secret token to identify the user (as seen in Google Calendar). Anyway, in both cases you probably should use secure connection (SSL) so data (and passwords) are not sent in clear.
And finally I would recommend the use of webcal:// or webcals:// scheme for ease of use for end-user. But you may face troubles with some clients (eg: Outlook 2007 and forced SSL). I don't have a work-for-all solution yet...
EDIT
I forgot to mention the ICS validator in case you don't use a lib .
My ASP.NET application will have to handle HTTP GET requests that will have the following URL format:
http://mySite/getStuff?id="actualIdHere"
currently the requirement is to validate that there're no parameters in the query string except id and indicate an error like "unknown parameter P passed".
Is such requirement a good idea? Will it interfere with some obviously valid cases of using the application I haven't thought of?
It would be better to just validate the presence of id.
Validating unknown parameters doesn't serve much of a purpose, they will just be ignored.
Just edited my answer here:
There are also tracking solutions out there that will add to your query string.
One that comes to mind is web analytics.
If your application is going to be a public web site, you will want to implement some tracking of your traffic (e.g. google analytics).
If you want to implement a marketing campaign to draw traffic to your site, you will likely need to add a few parameters (specific to the tracking system you're using) to your querystring to check the effectiveness of your campaign.
It depends on your target audience.
It is not a good practice for public websites where you are aware of SEO, for example if you implement Google Analytics then a user come to your site from Search Results may have a parameter in URL like googleclid.
However in more protected websites it is fine.
It might affect forward compatiblity. For example, if you have separate client applications/websites that actually call this URLs, and future versions of these clients might provide additional parameters to getStuff (like a sort ordering, backlink, etc), making hard requirements on the parameters might make it harder to roll out new versions smoothly (i.e. cannot roll out new clients until the server is updated).
This in addition to the traffic forwarding parameters public websites might get as additional input, like the other answers mention.