CalDAV Scheduling

Since version 2.1.0, sabre/dav ships with support for CalDAV scheduling, as defined by rfc6638.

This plugin enables several features:

  1. Inviting people on a CalDAV server.
  2. Automatically delivering invites to a CalDAV inbox.
  3. Functionality to Accept or Decline invites.
  4. Reading free-busy information from users on the server.

This specification is very widely supported by clients, but even clients that do not support this specification will trigger scheduling-related behavior.

For example, if a user creates a new event with an ORGANIZER that matches the current user, and at least one ATTENDEE, the server will automatically detect this and send invites to the relevant people.

When a user deletes the same invite, we will automatically send CANCEL notifications to anyone affected.

When an attendee sets their PARTSTAT to ACCEPTED or DECLINED, the server will also automatically update the organizer's event with this information and notify him that this has happened.

Enabling scheduling

To enable the base system, just add the plugin to your server:

$server->addPlugin(
    new Sabre\CalDAV\Schedule\Plugin()
);

Backend support

The PDO CalDAV backend has built-in support for local delivery. If you created your own CalDAV backend, you must implement the methods from the Sabre\CalDAV\Backend\SchedulingSupport interface to add support.

This interface adds 4 new methods for managing objects in a user's inbox.

Email delivery

If it's not possible to do a local delivery, or your backend does not support local delivery yet, it's possible to deliver messages via email. This is called iMip and defined in rfc6047.

To add support for iMip, add the following additional plugin:

$server->addPlugin(
    new Sabre\CalDAV\Schedule\IMipPlugin('server@example.org')
);

The iMip plugin generates very plain and arguably ugly emails. It also uses PHP's mail() function, which may not work for everyone due to the use of an STMP server.

We recommend people who need more advanced email functionality, or want to customize their email templates to subclass the IMipPlugin. It's a solid example and hopefully provides enough information to customize your emails further.

Availability

Since sabre/dav 3.1 availability is supported. This feature allows users to specify for example when their working hours are, such as 9am to 5pm on a daily basis.

After specifying this, the server will then use this information to generate freebusy reports, making them a lot more accurate and useful, especially with teams distributed in multiple timezones.

This feature is enabled automatically, but it will only work if the PropertyStorage plugin is enabled.

Limitations

We don't support the full specification yet. Non-exhaustive list of known issues:

  1. We don't do VTODO scheduling yet, and only support VEVENT.
  2. We don't have support for Schedule-Tag yet.

If you really need either of those features, let us know through the mailinglist or github issues. If we don't know, we don't know if we need to prioritize it.