How can I set up ical recurring events that are dependent on other events?

June 7, 2010 9:31 AM

Is there any way to set up a recurring iCal event that is dependent on a prior event? We have board meetings on the 4th Monday of every month, and staff meetings the following Tuesday morning. This normally wouldn't be difficult to set up in iCal-set up a similar event to fall on the 4th Tuesday- except for the odd months where there are 4 Mondays and 5 Tuesdays and the 4th Tuesday happens BEFORE the 4th Monday! Argh!

I've looked through the iCalendar specification and there doesn't seem to be a way to offset events based on other events, and iCal's interface is too rudimentary to set something like this up. Is there an Applescripty way to run through my calendars and set this up, or some other method? I'd rather not do it by hand since the meetings happen every month forever and ever, and I'd like to just set it up once and forget it. Any ideas?

posted by 40 Watt to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

No, it's not built into iCal. I don't know if another iCalendar-using calendar program might have it, but I'd guess not.

If you can write the algorithm (i.e., describe all of the tests that need to be run and run them), and you were something of a programmer, then you can insert the events into an iCal calendar by just writing out the events in XML. If you used Python, you could use its iCalendar package and be pretty far along on the first go. It has methods to walk the calendar file, and also provides some ways to write out the new calendar with the events you've added.
posted by zpousman at 12:46 PM on June 7, 2010

Sorry, the reference to XML above is incorrect. iCal is not XML, just a nested xml-like structure.
posted by zpousman at 12:49 PM on June 7, 2010