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Is it possible to create a Calendar Event from a hyperlink the same way you can trigger an email to be created doing:

<a href="mailto:me@anydomainname.com">eMail Us</a>

I want to have a service that suggests a meeting time to the user of the service, and if the user chooses they could easily create a Calendar Event based on the time suggested by the service. Ideally the service would provide a hyperlink that when clicked would open Google Calendar or the scheduling tool the user uses, and it would auto-create an event at the time specified and with the title specified by the service, and the user could then adjust and save the event to the calendar from there.

HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope
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1 Answers1

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Unfortunately there's no official URI scheme for calendar events like there is for email (mailto:) or phone calls (tel:—widely implemented but still in RFC status).

You may still be able to accomplish what you're going for with .ics files, however! The iCalendar file format is a plain-text representation of event data that is used by most major calendar apps, like Google Calendar, Outlook, and the macOS Calendar.

They look like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:uid1@example.com
DTSTAMP:19970714T170000Z
ORGANIZER;CN=John Doe:MAILTO:john.doe@example.com
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T035959Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

You could try setting up your service to generate .ics files with the appropriate data and offer them to the user as a teensy download. Google Calendar in particular may have an API to help with this, or to directly import it and save those users a step.

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n18l
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  • Thank you for the guidance. This is really helpful to know. If its helpful to others I found that there are some javascript packages that help you generate that .ics file such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/ics. Do you have a favorite ics javascript-based generator yourself @Infinimbal? – HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope Feb 15 '17 at 00:14
  • I don't have one in particular @HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope, as it's not something I've tried recently. The package you linked to certainly looks like it fits the bill though, and is probably what I would use in your situation! – n18l Feb 15 '17 at 17:13