As we all know a combination of Servoy and IT2BE’s plugins/beans make a really powerful collection of tools for the developer. I thought I would share a amusing little combination of features for those considering the Calendar Bean for a future project.
Adding diary entries to the calendar is a relatively stright forward process made somewhat easier by Marcels excellent example files. However if your end user is not currently logged into Servoy they may miss that vital appointment you create for them!!! So what are the options ? how about a text, cheap, simple and delivered within 4 seconds.
For those interested stick a button on the event screen with the following method attached:
//add your gateway provider here
var poster = plugins.http.getPoster(‘http://www.kapow.co.uk/scripts/sendsms.php’);
//This is mobile number - obviously dynamically applied
var mobile = poster.addParameter(‘mobile’,‘07725432287’);
//Your gateway provider username and password
var username = poster.addParameter(‘username’,‘yourusername’);
var password = poster.addParameter(‘password’,‘yourpassword’);
//…and your message - again dynamically applied
var sms = poster.addParameter(‘sms’,‘Servoy, Migcal and IT2BE rocks!’);
//…and the returned error code
var httpCode = poster.doPost(); //(httpCode 200 is ok);
This very simple little combo seems to work a treat. IF any of the great and the good in Servoy land knowhow to create a vCal card that works with iCal I would be very interested !!!
I am currently working on a plugin that will create vCalendar and vCards from within Servoy. The vCalendar part is pretty much finished. If you are willing to test that, please contact me via plugins@maison-partner.de.
IT2Be:
What about exporting an activity from the calendar as a iCalendar event… It is included in the bean and should work!
I meant to say .ics which I can then text to their phone. My understanding is this will then insert the appointment into their phone diary and potentially sync with Outlook/iCal etc when they sync. The issue is currently that the text gateway rejects the SMS as its too long and I don’t know how to attach a .ics file to the SMS YET!
We have 17 users who will all shortly be linked to Servoy, in due course all of the various version of Outlook/Outlook Express and iCal will be replaced with a shared IT2BE Calendar solution built into their Financial Services Business Management Tool. The only issue is that many of them sync to mobile phones so in the short term .ics is an option, medium term a sync to outlook and then phone and long term … who know a great plugin opportunity Marcel
The one thing I don’t know is your remark about filesize although the information is minimal…
Sending a text via the standard SMS getway is limited to the 160 character size. IF you send the text from a phone as an .ics file it does not allow any further characters to be added, however does seem to allow larger file sizes, I guess the difference between it being treated as a string or a file.