General feedback about the calendar experiment

[LouisJULIEN]

Hello,

I published a plugin that uses the calendar experiment. You suggested that I make some feedback, here it is!

Context

It is my first time developing a Thunderbird Plugin. I developed a Google Chrome plugin before and a few node JS website.
It took me quite some time to understand that I needed to use an experiment but I was very happy to find out one existed for calendar.

Overall

I'm so glad this experiment exists! It works great on my plugin and it wouldn't work without it.

Usage

It is reliable. What works once always work.

Documentation

Honestly, it's ok. Not beautiful but a simple Google Doc did the job for me

Features and usage

I was looking for event creation, it existed and works well.

However, the format expected for event creation (iCal or jCal) is quite hard to use for a dev such as me: no typing, the documentation is elsewhere, the format feels old.

Also, errors are logged sometimes in the plugin console, sometimes in the Thunderbird console. It can be tricky for a developer new to plugin development.

Finally, there's no way to catch error on event creation. It opens a pop up for the end user and that's it!

Feature suggestions

Sorted by order of importance according to my experience

1. Open the event creation GUI (the window used by the user when he creates a new event). I felt like I was coding lots of things that already existed, just with ugly code as it wasn't a key feature. For example, I check that the end date is after the start date and have no calendar selection option. Being able to open the already existing event creation GUI with some arguments (event title, calendar, start date, comment) would be so great!
2. Be able to go to the created event in the Calendar GUI
3. Get the default calendar
4. Offer event creation with typing and in a more natural format (JSON or native JavaScript dictionary)
5. Error handling for event creation

Takeaway

I'm very good at critique but I do like your experiment. It is good and nearly complete in terms of features.
I wouldn't be surprise to see it in Thunderbird in the next few months.

If you want more details about my experience, feel free to ask!

[kewisch]

I appreciate your feedback, thank you! I'm glad it works for you overall.

Regarding the format, this is reflected in what Thunderbird currently supports. iCalendar is indeed a bit dated, but it is what email clients use to exchange appointments with the maximum compatibility. It is documented in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5545 plus a few additional RFCs that add properties etc. Then there is jCal, which is actually JSON at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7265.html .

When you say JSON I believe you might be asking for a more key-value typed calendar format. There was work on this in jsCalendar https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8984/ , but it is a bit different: jsCalendar does not promise to be backwards compatible, so you can't just translate iCalendar to jsCalendar and back again. We don't use a library that implements jsCalendar at the moment. What could be done is adding jsCalendar support to https://github.com/kewisch/ical.js/ (if the data model works that way), but if add-on developers use that format instead of jCal/iCalendar, they will experience some amount of conversion loss.

For the time being, I'd recommend using jCal as the format, and https://github.com/kewisch/ical.js/ to interact with it.

Regarding opening the event dialog, this is a much requested feature, I've seen a few add-on developers do this. My API proposal for this (and other things) is in #38 , maybe you could take a look and see if there is anything missing? I'll add a comment about the default calendar and a way to open the create dialog.

I'm not 100% sure about the event creation errors, do you mean the API calls messenger.calendar.items.create() ? It should reject the promise on failure, but I'm not sure what level of details is available there. I'll admit I've not worried too much about the error case in any of the APIs unless it was immediately occurring for me.

I'd love to be able to turn this issue into actionalbe items, so let's see if we can work out a few concrete suggestions on things to change, starting with augmenting #38 for our needs.

[LouisJULIEN]

Thanks for your answers!

You got my message right, I was talking about having a key-value typed calendar format. I absolutely understand it's no easy feat. Backward compatibility didn't matter in my case.

I'll comment #38 directly! At first sight, it looks like my exact use case.

Well for creation error event, I didn't get any reject of Promise from messenger.calendar.items.create(). The promise was fulfilled, but the actual event creation failed and opened a pop-up (an user-level pop up). I tried to add a try-catch clause to double check: it didn't catch any error from the code and the pop up was still appearing.
The error case was happening quite a lot of time for me as I was getting familiar with the iCal and jCal formats. When the data was good enough to be accepted by the code but bad enough to be rejected by the server, I had this pop up appearing. I think when the date start date was after the end date, it triggered the issue (not sure).