Full Offline Mode now in Calendar 1.0 rc2

Calendar 1.0 rc 2 now comes with offline support packaged for CALDAV and ICS calendar providers. For CALDAV calendar it allows retrying of events if for any reason, the updates failed to be sent to the server.


You can find it at its new location on the addons.mozilla.org beta channel (If you still get 1.0rc1, then please try again in a few hours when the page cache has been updated).


If you encounter any issues, please file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org.


Or you can share your experiences via comments below.


Happy to hear from you regarding your experiences. Hope you enjoy the feature.


Cheers

mohit

And We are Getting There

Life's been pretty busy these days. Packing, Packing and only packing. Work on the offline feature is now edging closer and closer to testing phase. Bugs are being discovered everyday and fixed on a regular basis now.

The current state of the project allows a user to :-

• Edit, Delete and Create events offline and sync them back online
• Modify recurring events offline and sync them back online
• Handlers to detect cases when syncing is not possible if network connection is severed.
• Syncing the calendars on the loading
• Same handling for the Todos as well

The next set of items I am working on are:-

• Create a switching code that detects if additions, deletions etc are failing so that it can put the calendar in offline mode 
• Reconcile these items whenever calendar can be reached.

The above 2 are not even present in Apple iCal so this gives me a feeling that I am doing something new. I have not looked inside the new Lion OSX so I can't say that they have implemented this already, but lets see how this feature works. 

PS: If anyone is interested in testing the offline syncing features, then drop me a comment and i will host the xpi files somewhere. Or if you guys have any ideas that you wish to see in the feature let me know. Your feedback would be really really valued and appreciated, and plus I wish to stress that many many things might break if you are using a test version of Offline sync, so please don't use it for the real events.

Cheers

msk

Step 1: Doing offline changes to cached Events

This week a big step has been implemented and tested fully, the ability for the user to create and edit events in the offline mode. Such a step is significant since it leaves me with only to implement the sync algorithm. Wolfgang made several changes to the idl files and interfaces. The changes include:-

• calICalendar now has flags for OFFLINE_DELETED_ITEMS and created and modified items as well which allow us to changes the behavior of getItems() accordingly.
• There is a new interface calIOfflineStorage which defines the methods used to handle offline operations, currently only 3 methods are defined, offlineDelete, offlineAdd and offlineModify and calStorageCalendar.js which implements the backend for calIStorage interface, the basic SQLite handler for cached calendar, implements these methods. 
• The above methods changes the offline_journal flag, which is an additional field added to the SQL table cal_events and cal_todos. As such there was a need to write an upgrade function. This made me add code inside the calStorageUpgrade.jsm module, raising the database schema version to 20 from its current level of 19. 
• Since offline_journal is not a part of the standard calIEvent interface, there would always be hacks and workarounds all over the place since which writing and reading events, the functions inside calEvent.js and calTodos.js would destroy the sql columns of the record. For example, the modifyItem function inside calStorageCalendar.js first destroys the item in the database, then adds the new modified item. This a hack, wolfing told me and hence I must make sure that it does not screw up the offline_journal flag, hence before it actually goes ahead and deletes the item record, I get the flag and restore it when the modification has completed.

Coding wise, it all looks good and the wiki has been a life saver. Seriously without it there would be no progress at all. The next step is to get the sync in place. Steps for doing this have been outlined at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Lightning_Offline_Sync

cheers

msk

A New Turnaround

Yay, the project is going full steam now.

Wolfgang from Inverse and a contributor on a number of bugs in the calendar project has joined and is now directly overseeing the work I do.

I had a meeting with him and Ludovic and finalised the roadmap of the feature completion. The deadline we have set is to get the feature up and running in 3 weeks, which I think would not be difficult at all. And plus wolfgang is really helpful in speeding me into writing code and committing changes.

Wolfgang has created a branch at mtn.inverse.ca and I am working on getting the methods written down, while he writes the glue that is required to get the thing running smoothly.

Awesome Days ahead.
Mohit

Hacking around the code

First sucess is always a sweet one. No matter after how long it comes.

I spent this week, trying to hack around the calendar code-base.

Instead of making changes to the actual code and then building the product again and again, I am instead editing the application extension directly, since lightning is in the form of an extension to thunderbird, this makes it easy to edit the extension code and test out the functionality real time without the need for a build. This however, means, the application restarts everytime.

Anyways off to making at least deletion part of the syncing process.

cherios
msk