Support for Categories

Hi,

thank you for using my plugin.It always make me feel good to see my plugin seamless used in a beautiful website like yours.

I am glad to consider adding support for categories.This are my thoughts about it since I read your issue:

1. It is a small addition in functionality not very difficult to add, but it is a change in the core so an error or other side effects will potentially hit all existing users. So extra attention for testing is needed.
2. why use categories? To achieve (almost) the same goal in google or outlook I use different calendars under one account, if you could do that in the application that creates the iCal feed it would work without an adaptation of my plugin.
3. should I only filter or also display the categories?
4. How will google and outlook export categories in the ical file. How are they showed in their web-calendars. Here I came across a problem. Google does not support categories, Outlook does, but does not share them in the ical file. That makes the added value of the functionality much less and makes it difficult for me to create a realistic test file.

Conclusion so far: I will work on it, if you can send me an ical file (or url if it is public available ) from your feed source ( e.g. to bram at waasdorpsoekhan.nl) and tell me why a solution with more calendars, or different urls for each category does not work for you.

Regards

Bram Waasdorp

Thank you for considering this. I will email you an iCal feed and some additional information.

Regards
Richard

Thank you,

I have read your feed and the additional information. That convinced me that support for categories could be usefull for at least one user and also helps me to find a practically workable solution.

This is what I have in mind now for the implementation:

1. Retrieve the set of categories from the iCal events (when they exist) into my plugin-events as the event-set. Keep in mind that one event can contain 0 or more categories and that a category can contain a space.
2. Make one filter with a comma separated list of categories as the filter-set.
3. Make possible to choose one method to assess the intersection of both sets from a limited list of operators, ANY, ALL, NOTANY, NOTALL (maybe I find better names or symbols later)
4. ANY is true when at least one of the elements of the filter-set is contained in the event set, or in other words, the filter-set intersects the event-set, the intersection contains at least one element. This seems to me the most practical operator.
5. ALL is true when all the elements of the filter-set are contained in the event set, or in other words, the intersection contains the same number of elements as the filter-set. The event-set may contain other elements.
6. NOTANY is true when ANY is NOT true. The intersection is empty.
7. NOTALL is true when ALL is NOT true. The intersection contains less elements then the filter-set.
8. A special case are events without a categories set. As I have described it here the will only appear when the operator is NOTANY or NOTALL. I think of using a null-string (“”) in the filter set to represent events without a categories set. I don’t think this is correct in set theory and it may theoretical possible to define a category as a null string. Nevertheless I think this is te most practical solution to add the events without a category positive to a filter.
9. Make a toggle (or select) option to display the set of categories on top of an event (in a SMALL HTML line)
10. Add the list of categories of an event cleaned as classes (removed spaces etc.) to the html-classes of event.

Once I have realized this, I consider this issue resolved.

Regards

Bram

• This reply was modified 5 months ago by bramwaas.
• This reply was modified 5 months ago by bramwaas.

Uploaded to the plugins directory as 2.5.0.RC. if you like you can test with this version.

I will perform some regression tests to gain more certainty that the existing functionallity still works properly.

If I don’t encounter any major issues, I will release version 2.5.0 as the stable version in about two weeks

released version 2.5.0. with basic support for categories as described earlier.

Exception: 9 Make a toggle (or select) option to display the set of categories on top of an event (in a SMALL HTML line). This is not implemented as a toggle, but a string field where you can fill in the separator. If you leave this field empty the categories set will not be displayed.