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8.4. Finding Calendars

Much of the time, a calendar client (or agent) will discover a new calendar's location by being provided directly with the URL. For example, a user will type his or her own calendar location into client configuration information or copy and paste a URL from email into the calendar application. The client need only confirm that the URL points to a resource that is a calendar collection. The client may also be able to browse WebDAV collections to find calendar collections.

The choice of HTTP URLs means that calendar object resources are backward compatible with existing software, but does have the disadvantage that existing software does not usually know to look at the OPTIONS response to that URL to determine what can be done with it. This is somewhat of a barrier for WebDAV usage as well as with CalDAV usage. This specification does not offer a way through this other than making the information available in the OPTIONS response should this be requested.

For calendar sharing and scheduling use cases, one might wish to find the calendar belonging to another user. If the other user has a calendar in the same repository, that calendar can be found by using the principal namespace required by WebDAV ACL support. For other cases, the authors have no universal solution, but implementers can consider whether to use vCard [RFC2426] or LDAP [RFC4511] standards together with calendar attributes [RFC2739].

Because CalDAV requires servers to support WebDAV ACL [RFC3744], including principal namespaces, and with the addition of the CALDAV: calendar-home-set property, there are a couple options for CalDAV clients to find one's own calendar or another user's calendar.

In this case, a DAV:principal-match REPORT is used to find a named property (the CALDAV:calendar-home-set) on the Principal-URL of the current user. Using this, a WebDAV client can learn "who am I" and "where are my calendars". The REPORT request body looks like this:

To find other users' calendars, the DAV:principal-property-search REPORT can be used to filter on some properties and return others. To search for a calendar owned by a user named "Laurie", the REPORT request body would look like this:



  
 
   
 
 Laurie

The server performs a case-sensitive or caseless search for a matching string subset of "Laurie" within the DAV:displayname property. Thus, the server might return "Laurie Dusseault", "Laurier Desruisseaux", or "Wilfrid Laurier" as matching DAV:displayname values, and return the calendars for each of these.

This document was automatically converted to XHTML using an RFC to HTML converter with the original text document at the Internet Engineering Task Force web site at ietf.org .  The original text document should be referred to if there are any errors or discrepancies found in this document.

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