Floating Date/Time in iCal attachments

[royhiggs]

I've been using floating times for our ical attachments and they work great on every device/OS so far except for Blackberry devices. Apparently, Blackberry devices don't properly support the ical standard and interepret floating dates (i.e. w/out the UTC "Z" indicator and without a TZID) as UTC dates and convert them so it ends up being the wrong time on the user's calendar.

Anyone know if RIM plans on fully supporting the iCal standard to support floating times?

If you import the following calendar it should import to 8am to 1030 am your local time whatever your local time is, but the Blackberry incorrectly interprets the DTSTART and DTEND to be GMT time and performs a calculation to convert it to local time thereby changing the time to an incorrect time.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
PRODID:-//CompanyName//NONSGML SiteName//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
DTSTART:20081009T080000
DTEND:20081009T103000
LOCATION:111 Main St\, Roseville\, CA 95747
DESCRIPTION:
SUMMARY:Summary
TRIGGER60M
UID:fc2e4513-c9e7-4917-a91b-a0a9e7ab0435@theschedulecenter.com
SEQUENCE:3
DTSTAMP:20081009T192822Z
PRIORITY:5
STATUS:CONFIRMED
ORGANIZER;CN="Test Co":MAILTO:calendar@myorg.com
ATTENDEE;CN="An attenddee":MAILTO:calendar@myorg.com
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

[Dougsg38p]

Problem has been reported to RIM but they do not acknowledge that their PIM (JSR75)implementation is incorrect (with respect to dates).

In the meantime, we had to "adjust" the times (in and out) to allow for TMZ offset and DST.

[royhiggs]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I guess in the meantime I will have to try to work on some adjustment code. I was really hoping to not have to do that, though, because of the pesky DST issue. :(

Do you have a recommendation as to how I can best communicate this to RIM so we can add another tick to the "yes, you really do have a problem" tally?

Thanks,

[Dougsg38p]

I guess that reporting the issue on the RIM Java Development forum would work.

BlackBerry Support Community Forums - BlackBerry Support Community Forums - BlackBerry Support Community Forums

[royhiggs]

I've posted on the blackberry support forums. The feedback I've received from there is that they are user forums so because it is an issue with the blackberry devices/software itself there isn't much the user's can do to help. :(

When you reported it to RIM which method did you use? I'd like to see if I could report the issue to the same people. Hopefully that will take them one step closer to realizing that they do indeed have an issue.

[Dougsg38p]

Did you try the Java Development forum?