I've got a booking script. I'd like to get a notification in the bookers calendar, being it MS Outlook calendar, Google Calendar or any other popular caledar. I have very little experience in this field and seek basic "how to" information".
Serverside language: php.
Google WorkspaceOutlookPHP
Last Comment
Lennart Ericson
8/22/2022 - Mon
Ray Paseur
There is a calendar standard called hCalendar that implements RFC2445. Some other keywords of interest are iCal and vCal. These use the iCalendar file format which is the defacto standard for calendar information interchange.
You may be able to use PHP to force a download of a file with the ics file suffix. The client's computer may associate the .ics files with a calendar program. This file extension is used for calendaring and scheduling information.
The MIME type for iCalendar data is text/calendar.
I've done this in the past with an "add this event to my calendar" link. The link went to a PHP script and it had a URL parameter giving a key to the calendar entry. The PHP script used the key to locate the event row in the calendar database table. It generated an iCalendar object, which is a simple text file like this (thanks, Wikipedia)
BEGIN:VCALENDARVERSION:2.0PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//ENBEGIN:VEVENTUID:uid1@example.comDTSTAMP:19970714T170000ZORGANIZER;CN=John Doe:MAILTO:john.doe@example.comDTSTART:19970714T170000ZDTEND:19970715T035959ZSUMMARY:Bastille Day PartyEND:VEVENTEND:VCALENDAR
You may be able to use PHP to force a download of a file with the ics file suffix. The client's computer may associate the .ics files with a calendar program. This file extension is used for calendaring and scheduling information.
The MIME type for iCalendar data is text/calendar.
I've done this in the past with an "add this event to my calendar" link. The link went to a PHP script and it had a URL parameter giving a key to the calendar entry. The PHP script used the key to locate the event row in the calendar database table. It generated an iCalendar object, which is a simple text file like this (thanks, Wikipedia)
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If I can find a code example for this, I'll post it here and update these articles about handling date and time in PHP.https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/201/Handling-Date-and-Time-in-PHP-and-MySQL-Procedural-Version.html
https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/20920/Handling-Time-and-Date-in-PHP-and-MySQL-OOP-Version.html