I’ve been using ColdFusion to generate and mail iCal (*.ics) files. This should be a cinch, as they are really pretty simple text files. However, when I receive the file in Microsoft Outlook 2007, I have no options to add it to my calendar and I see the following message: “As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to the meeting.”
This is peculiar, as my address is not the organizer specified in the iCal file, it is only the recipient of the iCal attachment. I’m going to keep looking into it, but I thought I’d mention it here in case anyone else is running into the same issue.
The two functions I’ve found online to assist in generating iCal files are:
- iCalUS (via CFLib.org)
- CF_ICAL (via Planet Source Code.
I think this issue may have to do with how I was attaching the .ics file. I had been using a cfmailparam tag to specify the file and type (text/calendar).
When I switched to using the old method (the mimeattach attribute of the cfmail tag) Outlook 2007 let me add the meeting to my calendar. Perhaps this means that text/calendar isn’t the MIME type I should have been using.
Just tackled this issue myself, it is indeed caused by something in the headers. I didn’t quite work out exactly the problem was but fiddling with the headers resolved my problem. Posted up on it here -> http://www.julian-young.com/2009/07/07/php-ical-email/ (It’s PHP mind). I used the following for the overall message..
Content-Type: multipart/alternative
Content-class: urn:content-classes:calendarmessage
and
Content-Type: text/calendar;name=”meeting.ics”;method=REQUEST
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
for the iCal content. Hope that helps anyone else that stumbles upon this post!