Foreword

This document incorporates by reference the CalConnect Intellectual Property Rights, Appropriate Usage, Trademarks and Disclaimer of Warranty for External (Public) Documents as located at

http://www.calconnect.org/documents/disclaimerpublic.pdf.

1.  General comments and findings

Eight CalDAV servers were tested against 4 CalDAV clients. iSchedule, a new specification was tested as well by several servers. Examples of what was tested by CalDAV servers and clients are:

In addition, two vendors tested their application’s support for iCalendar, iTIP and iMIP. There were several clients who were testing iCalendar, iMIP and iTIP against regular clients as well as against several CalDAV servers so the CalDAV servers could test how they handled iMIP requests.

The following are general comments about what occurred and specific findings. Vendor names are not referenced. What is discussed are actual issues found so that developers of applications can recognize potential issues within their own products.

2.  CalDAV Testing

During CalDAV testing, the following things were noted:

When creating a new single-instance meeting with an alarm set to trigger 15 minutes prior to the schedule time of the meeting, a server removed the alarm after several update operations.

When modifying the location of the meeting a server did not preserve seconds on the override of the meeting.

After modifying the title of the first instance of the recurring meeting a server did not support the overwrite.

On the “Query all components and return ETag WebDAV property and all data” test, a CalDAV client did a query only for the etag, not the calendar data

When creating a calendar-query REPORT, one server’s Reports are overridden in separate resources with the same url.

After creating a new calendar in the current user’s personal calendar space, one CalDAV server appends “1” to the name of the created folder.

A CalDAV server verified an issue that makes it impossible to use alerts in one of the clients. Fixing the problem will require the server vendor to preserve non-standard properties specific to this client, so they do not have a complete resolution at the moment. A few other minor issues were also uncovered.

This same server discovered that they were missing a CalDAV operation (options request, not currently invoked by any other client). They implemented a fix during the interop and verified that the basic scheduling features worked after adding support for the options request. They helped one of the clients testing iCalendar uncover an issue with regards to incrementing sequence numbers when canceling events.

One CalDAV server noted that they found CalDAV implementations seems more mature than before. Items they noted were GUI and Usability issues in Availability settings in one of the clients. They noted incorrect server responses that caused problems with another client.

A CalDAV server noted the following issues within their own application:

Issues found with other clients and servers:

One CalDAV server noted that all Tomcat versions don’t work with large data amounts with CalDAV. They also noted that a client stored user credentials in the browser cache and even if the server deleted a calendar account and added it back it didn’t ask them to re-authenticate. Also, upon deletion, we had to clear the browser cache to clear user credentials. This happened on Internet Explorer and Firefox.

A CalDAV server noted the following:

Problems found:

Another server observed the following during testing of iSchedule.

One server noted:

There were a number of fixes needed to new code — mostly in CalDAV scheduling — had a number of interactions with a server with problems at both ends.

One server tested with a client and found it worked well enough with the new CalDAV scheduling draft.

3.  iCalendar Testing

Two vendors tested their applications against each other and other servers that would accept iCalendar objects. These were some of the findings. What is shown is the specific test and observations for each test.

Send a meeting invitation

Accept a meeting invitation

Cancel a Meeting Invitation

Send an invite with Rich Text

Send an invite with attachments

Update a meeting invitation

Reschedule the original meeting invitation

Decline a meeting invitation

Create a meeting with required and optional Participants

Create a repeating monthly by date

Create a repeating monthly by day

Create a repeating monthly event from end

Create a repeating yearly

Create a repeating RDATE meeting

Repeats with no end date

Repeat every other…​

Test until (daily)

Create a repeating daily invite

Update the invite (all instances)

Reschedule the invite (all instances)

Cancel the invite (all instances)

Update one instance, then series

Cancel a single instance

Reschedule a single instance

Update a single instance

Accept the updated single instance

Counter a single date

Cancel this and all future instances

Reschedule meeting and all future instances

Remove an attendee from a simple meeting

Add an attendee to a series

Create a meeting with Reminders — one for 5mins, one for 10 mins

Items not supported by several applications:

A summary of significant interoperability issues is as follows:

4.  Summary

This meeting was our largest interoperability event to date. Eight CalDAV servers and 4 CalDAV clients were tested as well as iCalendar, iMIP and iTIP

The most significant takeaway from this event was CalDAV clients were able to test with the majority of the servers. In the past, because things were often not finished or applications had issues, it was not possible to complete testing. The fact that one client was able to successfully test against 8 servers during a two day process shows tremendous progress. I look forward to the next set of testing to see how much improvement has been made, particularly with respect to CalDAV scheduling.

With regards to iCalendar testing general interoperability worked far better than it has in the past and it is clear that strong interoperability efforts have been and are being made by many of the vendors present.

Respectfully submitted by Pat Egen, CalConnect Interop Manager.