Customize calendar feeds

When you publish your calendar, Trumba Connect generates RSS, Atom (XML), and Icalendar (ICS) feeds that visitors can access from your calendar. Visitors can subscribe to your RSS or Atom feed to get notified of your calendar updates as soon as you make them. They can download the ICS feed to a file that they can import into their own calendar programs.

By default, a calendar's feeds show five weeks of event information starting from the current week. This topic describes how to edit the date range and number of events that are sent through a feed, or to add xCal data to RSS feeds. You can make these changes in:

Feeds that visitors get when they click the appropriate button on your calendar.
Feeds that you can provide to visitors through hyperlinks on your web pages.

Note The information in this topic assumes that you have published your calendar or are familiar with the publishing process. Learn more about publishing calendars…

Topic links

Customize feeds sent from your Trumba calendar spud
Build URLs to provide custom feeds through links on your web page
Allow access to your calendar RSS data via XSLT

Additional information includes:

Supported parameters for building query strings
Get the base URL for the feed you want to customize
Accessing password-protected calendars' feeds

Customize the default feeds sent from your Trumba calendar spud

You can customize the feed that is sent when a visitor clicks the RSS button, or, on the Subscribe page, subscribes to the Atom (XML) feed or downloads the ICS file.

To customize default feeds

In your Trumba editing environment, display your published calendar and click Publish to open the Publishing Control Panel.
Click the Feeds tab. In the Available Custom Feeds section, for the feed you want to customize, select Edit Settings.
In the Edit Settings page:
- Set the start and end dates that you want sent in the feed.
- For RSS and Atom feeds, set the maximum number of events to include within the start and end date range.
- Select the Ongoing events check box if you want to include multiple-day events that begin before and end after the start date.
- In RSS feeds, you can also include xCal data.
Click Preview to confirm that the settings are what you want.
Click OK when you're done editing the settings.

Build URLs to provide custom feeds through links on your web page

If you want to provide links on your web pages for a choice of different feeds, you can build your own URLs in addition to customizing the default feed. For example, if you publish a calendar of events for a group of nightclubs, you might want provide viewers with the current week's all-ages vs. 21 and older shows, or the current week's shows at each club.

Note Although this topic addresses calendar publishers, anyone can use this information to create a custom URL to retrieve data from a Trumba Connect published calendar.

To customize the URL for your calendar feeds

First find the base URL for the feed you want to customize.
Specify what information you want to retrieve from the calendar by appending query strings to the default URL, using one or a combination of the supported parameters.
To add the query strings, at the end of the default URL for the feed, add a question mark (?) to begin the first parameter, and use an ampersand (&) to combine parameters. For example:

http://www.trumba.com/calendars/[calendarwebname].rss?
startdate=20080205&weeks=1&previousweeks=0

In your calendar settings, if you set Week display starts to Sunday, this will display events that occur between Sun. and Sat. of the week that includes Feb. 5, 2008. In other words, events that occur on Feb. 3–9.

Supported parameters for building query strings

The following table lists the parameters you can use to retrieve specific information from an RSS, Atom, or ICS feed published from Trumba Connect.

Parameter	How to use it
startdate	Specify a start date. If not specified, uses the current date. Date format is yyyymmdd, for example, 20080205 for 5 Feb. 2008. Note Formerly the date parameter was used to specify the start date. The date parameter is still supported for the time being, but for new feeds, please use startdate instead.
enddate	Specify an end date using the same date format as for startdate above. If not specified, all future events are included in the feed.
months	Number of calendar months to retrieve. Use months=0 to retrieve one day only. If excluded, the default setting is six months.
weeks	Number of calendar weeks to retrieve.
days	Number of days to retrieve (frequently used with the startdate parameter).
previousweeks	Number of weeks previous to the specified date to retrieve. If previousweeks is excluded, the feed will include two weeks' worth of events previous to the specified date (or the current date if date is not specified).
mixin, mixout	Specify which calendars' events to mix into the feed. Values of these parameters are set by including the calendar id number of each calendar to mix in or out, separated by URL-encoded commas. You use the mixin and mixout parameters for feeds as you do for URLs that display spuds. Learn more…
xcal	Add xcal=1 to an RSS feed to include xCal-namespace data. Supported only by RSS.

Tip Calendar feeds also support some URL parameters that are available for displaying calendar spuds. For example, you can use the search parameter to display a feed that contains events that match the specificed search string. See the list of spud URL parameters.

How time periods are determined

Time periods are based on calendar weeks and months. For example, if you specify a date and a number of months, the information returned will start from the first of the month specified in the date. Likewise, information returned for weeks is determined by the week start day in the calendar settings. Usually weeks are set to start on Sunday or Monday.

Allow access to your calendar RSS data via XSLT

Use the xCal parameter to enable access to the calendar's RSS data via XSLT. If xcal=1, the RSS feed will include the following xCal tags for basic data that applies to the calendar or to each event.

Tag	Applies to
xCal:prodid	calendar
xCal:version	calendar
xCal:method	calendar
xCal:summary	event
xCal:location	event
xCal:dtstart	event
xCal:duration	event
xCal:x-microsoft-cdo-alldayevent	event
xCal:description	event
xCal:uid	event

For example, to the following default event information:


<item>

<title>Massenet's Manon</title>

<description><b>Massenet's Manon</b>
<br/>Met Opera Broadcast<br/>Saturday, April 08, 2006
<br/>10:30 AM - 2:15 PM<br/><br/>
Fleming, Giordano, Chaignaud, Robbins; López-Cobos</description>

     <link>http://www.trumba.com/calendars/metbroadcasts?eventid=23491156</link>

     <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.trumba.com/guid/CwAvhUERZlLH2VHRUqeYYJko-zmv16LRHD4G2FH4XcQxwQ!!</guid>

     <category>2006/04/08 (Sat)</category>

     <pubDate>07 Jan 2006 00:29:17 GMT</pubDate>

  </item>

The following additional information appears:


<xCal:summary>Massenet's Manon</xCal:summary>

<xCal:location>Met Opera Broadcast</xCal:location>

<xCal:dtstart>2006-04-08T10:30:00Z</xCal:dtstart>

<xCal:dtend>2006-04-08T14:15:00Z</xCal:dtend>

<x-microsoft:cdo-alldayevent>False</x-microsoft:cdo-alldayevent>

<xCal:description>Fleming, Giordano, Chaignaud, Robbins; López-Cobos</xCal:description>

<xCal:uid>

X-TRUMBA-CwAvhUERZlLH2VHRUqeYYJko-zmv16LRHD4G2FH4XcQxwQ!!

</xCal:uid>

And the following calendar tags appear a the top of the feed.


<xCal:prodid>
-//Trumba Corporation//Trumba Connect Services 0.11.1402//EN
</xCal:prodid>
<xCal:version>2.0</xCal:version>
<xCal:method>PUBLISH</xCal:method>
<xCal:calscale>GREGORIAN</xCal:calscale>

Get the base URL for the feed you want to customize

The default base URL for a feed is always your calendar's address on the Trumba Connect hosted server, with the appropriate extension appended to it.

For RSS, append .rss to the default URL.
www.trumba.com/calendars/yourcalendarwebname.rss
For Atom, append .xml to the URL.
For Icalendar (Ical or ICS), append .ics to the URL.

Trumba Connect makes your published calendar feeds available in two locations:

www.trumba.com/calendars/yourcalendarwebname.extension
www.trumba.com/service/yourcalendarwebname.extension

The information available in a feed depends on which URL you use.

www.trumba.com/calendars/…
- The default URL when you request a feed for a published calendar.
- Feeds include mixed-in events.
www.trumba.com/service/…
- Feeds do not contain events from mixed-in calendars.

Accessing password-protected calendars' RSS feeds

You can publish calendars with password protection.

When you are signed in to your Trumba account, you can access the RSS feed for an unpublished calendars by assigning a web name to your calendar (in the Calendar Settings page) and then using the www.trumba.com/service/… URL. Tell me more about web names.
When you're not signed in, the RSS reader you use to open or subscribe to a password-protected calendar's RSS feed must allow you to sign in to a password-protected address.