Floating Date/Time in iCal Attachment

[royhiggs]

I've been using floating times for our ical attachments and they work great on every device/OS so far except for Blackberry devices. Apparently, Blackberry devices don't properly support the ical standard and interepret floating dates (i.e. w/out the UTC "Z" indicator and without a TZID) as UTC dates and convert them so it ends up being the wrong time on the user's calendar.

Anyone know if RIM plans on fully supporting the iCal standard to support floating times?

If you import the following calendar it should import to 8am to 1030 am your local time whatever your local time is, but the Blackberry incorrectly interprets the DTSTART and DTEND to be GMT time and performs a calculation to convert it to local time thereby changing the time to an incorrect time.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
PRODID:-//CompanyName//NONSGML SiteName//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
DTSTART:20081009T080000
DTEND:20081009T103000
LOCATION:111 Main St\, Roseville\, CA 95747
DESCRIPTION:
SUMMARY:Summary
TRIGGER:-60M
UID:fc2e4513-c9e7-4917-a91b-a0a9e7ab0435@theschedulecenter.com
SEQUENCE:3
DTSTAMP:20081009T192822Z
PRIORITY:5
STATUS:CONFIRMED
ORGANIZER;CN="Test Co":MAILTO:calendar@myorg.com
ATTENDEE;CN="An attenddee":MAILTO:calendar@myorg.com
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

[JeffH]

Very interesting post. Please see the Time Zones post that's linked in my sig for a detailed discussion of how BlackBerry handles time zones. I'd appreciate any thoughts you have on the subject.

[royhiggs]

Hi Jeff,

Great post. I'm sure that helped clear time zone issue up for a lot of people.

For iCal attachments, the standard says that if the time format is in floating time then the application should import the time without any conversion. So if the floating time says 10am then the appointment should be imported as 10am for the user's time zone whatever time zone the user is set to.

Unfortunately, the Blackberry doesn't do this. It assumes that the time is in GMT and converts the time. This is incorrect behavior and does not adhere to the iCal standard.

From feedback I've received on other forums is that this issue has been reported to RIM but that RIM refuses to acknowledge that they don't adhere to the standards wo we're in a bit of an uphill battle here. The first step to fixing a problem is to recognize that there is a problem. Seems as if RIM hasn't passed this first step yet.

[JeffH]

Roy,
Thanks for reading my thread. Your post is very helpful in explaining why BlackBerry appointments behave the way they do. I've added a link to your thread in my thread, so that anyone finding my explanation of how it works can then find your explanation of why.

Welcome to the forums! We're always glad to have developers.

[patrick.waugh]

When you think about it, what you call a "floating" time is a time without a time zone. iCal just makes the assumption that no zone = your zone, whereas RIM makes a more universal assumption that no zone is the universal ZULU.

If you were in the military, this would make even more sense to you. Basically, they are just different. It's a bit like telling me your weight is 100, but not saying pounds or kilograms. You can't really get upset if I choose kilos, when you could have told me.

Basically, there are two camps.. the one that says when I say 10am, I mean 10am local at the location of the event, and the other camp which says I mean 10am local (ie 8am there, and 10am here).

I find the RIM way more precise, and think it only doesn't make sense to people because the tools they are using do not handle time correctly (in the sense of requiring you to set a zone). After all, 10 am is meaningless, without telling someone what time zone isn't it?

Good luck with a work around. Try linux. =)

Patrick

[JeffH]

Good to hear from you again, Patrick. It seems you've come around to my way of thinking on time zones. I take it you're not presently developing a solution. At least Outlook 2007 makes the time zone selection explicit, instead of forcing you to take the PC's time zone.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com