How often have you wanted appointment details from your QuickBase application to appear on another program's calendar? The bad old days of copy and paste are over. QuickBase offers integration with iCalendar, a popular standard for exchanging scheduling information. It's a nifty way to make appointment details portable. (Read more about iCalendar.)
When you add the iCalendar feature to your application, users can click an icon to download a set of basic appointment information. It all travels as a package: subject, time, location—whatever fields you want to make portable. Users can save it to disk as an .ics file (read more about this format) or they can use a program like Outlook to open and save it in their own calendar (see image below). When you email a record that contains an iCalendar field (via a notification or by clicking the record's email button), QuickBase sends the .ics file as an attachment the recipient can save to their calendar.
An iCalendar field appears as an icon on QuickBase forms or in reports. Click the icon, and your browser lets you open and/or save scheduling information.
FAQ - Why is the time in my QuickBase record
different than the time that shows up in my Microsoft Outlook calendar?
QuickBase and Outlook communicate on time zones, which may result in this
kind of discrepancy. For example, if your company headquarters are in
California but you're in New York, your QuickBase
billing account's time zone is probably set to Pacific Time. QuickBase
passes this information onto Outlook and Outlook automatically adjusts
the time to Eastern Standard Time for you. That means if the appointment
begins at 10am in QuickBase, that time translates to 1pm in your Outlook
calendar.
To add an iCalendar field:
To get this working, you'll follow the steps below to add an iCalendar field to your Tasks or Appointments table (wherever you store scheduling information) and configure it to draw details from fields in that table. Once you do so, the field lets you send that information on the road. You can export it into your Outlook calendar or email it to a colleague.
Open the application which should feature the iCalendar field.
Add an iCalendar field in one of the following ways:
In the menu on any application page, select Customize > Create a new > field. Select the table you want to feature the new iCalendar field.
In the table bar on any application page, click the table you want to feature the iCalendar field. Within the menu that appears, select Customize --tablename-- table > Fields. This should be a table like Tasks or Appointments—any table where you store scheduling information.
Name the field and set field type.
In the Label box, type a name for the field (iCalendar
is a good name) and then from the type dropdown, select iCalendar.
Click Add Fields. When QuickBase prompts you to add
the field to custom forms you'll probably want to do so. That way,
users can access this new feature. (You can add it to reports, later.)
Now, you've got a nifty iCalendar field. But your work isn't over. You must configure the field to collect the information you want.
To configure the iCalendar field:
Associate iCalendar fields with corresponding
fields from your table.
The iCalendar feature contains fields, just like your application table
does. You must match up your scheduling information fields with iCalendar's
fields. That way, the iCalendar knows what fields to extract and group
into its portable format and also what to call them.
Within the iCalendar Options section, click each dropdown
and select a field from your table that contains the corresponding
information. You'll notice that not all fields are available. That's
because each iCalendar field can only handle a certain data types:
In iCalendar's Subject Field dropdown, select a text type field from your QuickBase table.
iCalendar Location and Description fields can take values from any text type field.
Match iCalendar's Starting Time Field and End Time Fields with a date / time type field in your table. For example you may have a field called Start and/or Calculated Finish Date. You can also select date and workdate type fields from these dropdowns as well as formula - date, formula - workdate and formula - date/time type fields. When you use date or workdate fields and send the .ics file to Microsoft Outlook or another scheduling program, the outside program treats these fields as all day events.
Note: Even though these iCalendar fields have the word time in the label, you can't link them to a QuickBase Time of Day type field. Time of day fields are missing vital information that iCalendar needs to know when something is happening—namely, the DATE. That's why these fields require date / time type values. Or, simple date type values will suffice as well.
If you don't want to include a field from your table, don't select it. iCalendar won't know it exists. But, you MUST make a selection in any field with a red *asterisk.
After you've matched up all fields, click Save.
FAQ - Can I draw my iCalendar field into
another table by making it a lookup field?
Yes! The iCalendar field will work as a lookup field. Say you want to add
the iCalendar field to appear next to your Task table's Related
Project field, so users can easily send or copy the project schedule.
To get it there, create a lookup field
that displays in Tasks. The iCalendar field functions the same way when
it's a lookup field. Users just need to click the icon to open or download
scheduling information.
When
you're done, don't forget to add the new iCalendar field to any forms
or reports where you want it to appear.