How to subscribe to a read-only ICS service without username and password and without support for PROPFIND

[nagmat84]

Our university (publicly) publishes a personalized university calendar with the student's courses as an ICS read-only calender file. The web sever only supports HTTP GET to fetch an ICS-formatted calendar file.

How can I subscribe to that calendar with DAVx5?

I tried the following steps:

1. Add account
2. Advanced login
3. Fill out the form as follows:
   • Base URL: https://campus.kit.edu/sp/webcal/
   • User name: left empty
   • Password: left empty
4. Click "Login"

DAVx5 reports the error "Couldn't find CAalDAV nor CardDAV service: The base URL doesn't seem to be an accessible CalDAV/CardDAV URL and service detection was not successful".

The DAVx5 log file shows

Checking user-given URL: https://campus.kit.edu/sp/webcal/<removed-for-privacy-reasons>
2024-11-02 14:00:50 551 [.network.HttpClient]         --> PROPFIND https://campus.kit.edu/sp/webcal/<removed-for-privacy-reasons> h2
...
2024-11-02 14:00:50 551 [.network.HttpClient]         --> END PROPFIND (290-byte body)
2024-11-02 14:00:50 551 [.network.HttpClient]         <-- 405 https://campus.kit.edu/sp/webcal/<removed-for-privacy-reasons> (77ms)

The server does not support the PROPFIND method. However, you can simply download an ICS formatted file with HTTP GET via that URL.

It is possible to subscribe to that URL with all other popular WebCAL clients like Thunderbird, Nextcloud Calender App, Kontacts, etc.

[rfc2822]

Webcal is currently not implemented in DAVx5 but ICSx5. Does that help: https://www.davx5.com/faq/subscribe-ics-file

[nagmat84]

Yes, that explains it. Thank you for the link.

Actually, I figured that out myself only half an hour after I had posted this question. I first subscribed to the university's ICS calendar with my own Nextcloud instance which in turn "advertises" the ICS calendar to my Android client. Then DAVx5 was able to discover the ICS calendar URL and integrate it into ICSx5.

Thanks again.

PS: Are there any plans to merge both apps into one? It is a little bit confusing to have two apps for that.

[rfc2822]

Well Webcal doesn't have anything in common with CalDAV (except that it uses iCalendar), so we have made two apps. Also ICSx5 is a bit of "testbed" for DAVx5 development.

However we plan to implement Webcal sync as a DAVx5 "tool" (like WebDAV access) in mid-term. See #439