Jacques Delsemme

Displaying CruzTime in Google Calendar

This is no longer needed since UCSC abandoned CruzTime in favor of Google Calendar.

As far as I know, there is no easy way to synchronize your CruzTime calendar (based on Oracle CorporateTime) with your Google Calendar in both directions (send me mail to prove me wrong!). But it is fairly easy to have a read-only copy of your CruzTime calendar displayed in your Google Calendar. Here is how to do so:

  1. Change your CruzTime password so that it is unique (so that it is not shared with any of your other accounts). You will need to transmit your password over the net, and it will be stored by a third party. Making it unique will limit your exposure; I consider (as does Steve) this security risk to be low, and the worst that can happen would be that your calendar could be defaced. Evaluate whether this is acceptable to you, and use these instructions accordingly.
  2. To extract your CruzTime data, use this URL: 
    https://cruztime.ucsc.edu:443/ocas-bin/ocas.fcgi?sub=syncml&user=USER&pass=PASS&eventsdb=./Calendar/Events?/dr(-7,30)
    where USER is your CruzID, PASS is your CruzTime password (do NOT use your CruzID password!) selected in step 1, and dr(-7,30) is the date range to be extracted, in this case: 7 days before and 30 days after today.
  3. Convert it to ical format with: 
    http://sync.syncml2ical.com/?serverurl=URL
    where URL is the URL in step 2.
  4. Unfortunately there is a time discrepancy in how CruzTime and Google encode the time, and the ony way to correct for it is to add or subtract the time offset from GMT in your ical data (from the previous step). To do so, go to: 
    http://ical.dudeami.com/
    and insert the combined URL in their entry box, and add 7 hours (for PDT) to it. It will return something like: 
    webcal://ical.dudeami.com/cal/get/ift7ddh0eqhhhokv/7
    The hash (here ift7ddh0eqhhhokv) returns a unique identifier for your CruzTime calendar based on what you've entered. The 7 at the end is the time offset in hours.
  5. To add this calendar to your Google Calendar, login to your Google Calendar, go under "Other calendars", and in its drop-down menu, select "Add by URL", and in the box that pops up enter (remember to change webcal to http): 
    http://ical.dudeami.com/cal/get/ift7ddh0eqhhhokv/7
    Be patient, it may take a while before the CruzTime data shows up.

Limitations

The time offset generated by ical.dudeami.com does not take Daylight Savings into account, so you may need to set up 2 calendars (one with a 7, and another with an 8 hour offset: change the last digit in step 5) and make only one of them visible in Google according to the current time zone (PST vs. PDT).

Google will not necessarily update your Google calendar whenever you, or someone else, make a change to your CruzTime calendar. It is refreshed periodically, but it could be hours before the changes are visible in Google.

Credits

W3C validators: check nu css links https://www.delsemme.org/jacques/howtos/googlecal.php
Last modified Sunday, January 1, 2017 @ 09:39pm
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