Improving the Google Calendar API

March 19, 2014


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By Lucia Fedorova, Google Calendar API Team

Choose your own event IDs

Imagine you work at a package delivery company and are developing a system for automatically assigning deliveries to your employees. Each of your employees has a work calendar in Google Calendar and needs to know when and where to be for the next delivery. Previously, you had to store an ID of an event in the internal deliveries database; otherwise you would not be able to find and update calendar events when work assignments changed. But now you can simply use the delivery ID as the ID of a corresponding event in Google Calendar. The complexity of figuring out which calendar event matches which delivery entirely disappears. This opens up a whole new set of integration options -- for example, when an employee declines the calendar event, Google Calendar can notify you so that you can automatically reschedule the delivery to someone else.

Try it out for yourself: just set the ID field when creating a new single or recurring event via the Calendar API v3 and observe that it sticks! The IDs must still follow certain format, but don’t worry -- it’s possible to represent almost any content in the ID by using base32hex encoding.

Set up notifications for changes in your calendar

It’s also now possible to use the Calendar API to specify how you want to receive notifications each time an event is added to a calendar or a guest responds to an invitation. The different types of change notifications can be toggled separately, which means you can set up different notification types for new events, changed events, canceled events, response updates and daily agendas. These settings are available for each calendar in the CalendarList collection.

If you are interested in using these new features, check out the Google Calendar API v3 documentation for Events and CalendarList to get started.

Lucia Fedorova is a Tech Lead of the Google Calendar API team. The team focuses on providing great experience to Google Calendar developers and enabling new and exciting integrations.

Posted by Louis Gray, Googler