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Using
Mozilla or
Firefox with the
calendar extension
or the stand-alone
Sunbird?
Playing with .ics files?
These notes were originally written round Calendar 0.8 with Mozilla 1.1, September 2002
They were revisited and revised to bring them up to date for Sunbird 0.2, the stand-alone Calendar release of January 2005
You have an .ics file on your website and click on a link
to it and you get the plain text displayed in your browser?
Check the page information, page info under the the view
menu in Mozilla, if it says 'Type'
text/plain
If you want Mozilla to subscribe to the data into its calendar when you download the file, then your server needs to send the file out with the MIME type:
text/calendar
In Linux (or Red Hat 7.0 at least), this can be done on a system-wide basis by adding a
line into the /etc/mime.types file:
text/calendar ics
Apache reads these defaults through a
TypesConfig
command in the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf configuration file.
Apache will need to be restarted after changing the mime.types data.
If Mozilla has displayed the plain text then it has the file, and its MIME type, in its cache. Check the page info, you will probably need to clear the disc cache and reload.
A less intrusive option, to set the MIME type just for Apache rather than
the system as a whole, is to use the
AddType
command. This can be specified in the .htaccess file so is under control of
the webmaster rather than the server administrator:
AddType text/calendar .ics
.htaccess set up for the site or
directory containing the .ics files, you do not
need to restart the server but you might still need to
clear your Mozilla cache when checking.
For more information see the Using .htaccess tutorial and the Apache configuration files documentation.
If you cannot set the MIME type for text/calendar files on the
server for some reason then you can cheat by specifying
webcal in the URL instead of http. So using:
webcal://www.mymachine.org/test.ics
http://www.mymachine.org/test.ics
The cost here is that most browsers, Internet Explorer for example, will
not know what to do with a webcal:// URL. Your machine may have
calendar/diary/schedule programs installed but the browser simply does not
recognise the URL and know it has anything to do with event or 'to do' data.
When Mozilla connects to a server via a webcal:// URL it is
still using the http protocol and using Port 80. It is not using the protocol
designed specifically for transporting Calendar data, cap: