Contact Birthdays calendar?

[sprnza]

Is it me not able to find, or there is no an option to have contacts birthdays to be aggregated in a separate or already existed calendar?

[Unrud]

This is not supported on the server-side by Radicale. Some clients support it. (e.g. Evolution or Birthday Adapter)

[dirdi]

I understand that Radicale does not support this, yet. However, it would be convenient to have such a feature on the server-side, since many clients do only support the creation of birthday events through a plugin, resulting in one to install a ton of plugins on different clients.

Maybe this bug report could be reopened, as a feature request?

Btw. sabredav for example supports this since late 2015.

[kerbless]

Quoting @dirdi, is it hard to implement?

[reitzig]

FWIW, Birthday Adapter doesn't seem to work on Android 14 (no updates since 2016) and Google Calendar does not show birthdays from contacts other than from Google accounts (doesn't work with DAVx5 contact accounts, anyway). So, an a current Android phone I'm sort of stuck short of installing a different calendar app (aCalender might work, as per davx5/faq).

Somehow, it seems neater to have radicale expose a CalDAV calender based on a(ny) contacts store.

@Unrud, would you be open to discussing this as a feature request? And/or reviewing a PR?

[jlbribeiro]

@reitzig Regarding Android calendar apps, Fossify Calendar has "Add contact birthdays" and "Add contact anniversaries" options; this only "displays them" in the app, it does not generate calendars available to other Android apps.

(Personally I coded something to auto-generate a birthday and anniversaries calendar based on my address book contacts, by leveraging the storage.hook mechanism, inspired by this comment; this allows using those calendars both system-wide and across devices (which feels like a more "consistent" experience). Don't think it's worth sharing since it makes some assumptions on deployment/environment + it's coded in Go (and not Python), but I might consider it.)

Would rather have this as part of Radicale itself.

[theJoshMuller]

Agreed, I'd love to have this as part of Radicale.

[sprnza]

@jlbribeiro Could you please share the Go script if it's still around.

[pbiering]

To get this "magic" proper running I think there are two options:

1. regular job which scans address book and create/add/remove in a configured or predefined calendar related ics files in async way

2. doing this on request only on a virtual calendar (with caching files only) automatically created by option for each addressbook on the fly. On every trigger it checks content of related addressbook for any changes, update cache if needed and serve the result - no "physical" ICS files will be created.

[reitzig]

3. After initialization, hook into updates to the address book to update the birthday/anniversary calendar whenever a date is added/changed/removed.

[fin444]

I have created a simple script to handle this outside of Radicale using VCF-to-ICS. Change the CONTACTS_DIR and BIRTHDAYS_DIR, and then set it to run daily with a cron or something, and it should Just Work. Though the birthday calendar will need to be separate with no other events, and be named "Birthdays".

CONTACTS_DIR=/var/lib/radicale/collections/collection-root/fin444/43a4b15d-2870-8ba2-b3d1-ef1c78b1410a
BIRTHDAYS_DIR=/var/lib/radicale/collections/collection-root/fin444/7137166a-0797-815c-8e2c-d287247c7011

shopt -s nullglob
rm "$BIRTHDAYS_DIR"/*.ics
for contact in "$CONTACTS_DIR"/*.vcf; do
	python vcf_to_ics.py -i "$contact" -o "$BIRTHDAYS_DIR/$(basename "$contact" .vcf).ics" -n Birthdays
done

[hadleyrich]

Nice solution. I was just contemplating writing a quick plugin to achieve this but something like this seems like it could be run from the storage hook in the config file from a quick look.