Creating Calendar Unique Identifiers (calid's)

Each calendar in the Calendar Server database is identified by a unique calendar identifier (ID) or calid. When creating calendars, you are required to specify the calid.

This section contains the following topics:

• Calid Syntax

• Calendar ID Creation Rules

• Converting Non-Hosted calid's to Hosted Domain Format calid's

Calid Syntax

Each calendar in the database is identified by a unique calendar ID (calid). The following calid syntax has three parts:

userid[@domain][:calendar-name]

The three parts are:

userid

A user ID that is unique for the domain in this Calendar Server instance.

domain

The name of the user’s domain.

With no hosted domains, the domain part is optional since there is no ambiguity about which domain the user is in.

With hosted domains, if the domain part is not specified, then Calendar Server uses the value specified in the ics.conf parameter service.defaultdomain for the domain. If the user is not in the default domain, the domain part must be specified.

For more information about hosted domains (also called virtual domains), see Chapter 11, Setting Up Hosted Domains and Chapter 13, Administering Hosted Domains.

calendar-name

An optional calendar name that is unique to the specific user. Although an owner has only one default calendar, it is possible to have other calendars for various purposes. Each of these non-default calendars is distinguished by its calendar name. For example, if user John Doe has a uid jdoe, his default calendar might be jdoe@sesta.com. An auxiliary calendar he uses to keep track of baseball games for the Little League team he coaches might be identified with the following calid: jdoe@sesta.com:baseball.

Calendar ID Creation Rules

When creating a calid, keep in mind the following rules:

• Calendar ID's are case sensitive. For example, JSMITH is not equivalent to jsmith. (This differs from email addresses, which are not case sensitive. For example, jsmith@sesta.com is equivalent to JSMITH@SESTA.COM.)

• A calendar ID cannot contain spaces and is limited to the following characters:

  • Alphabetic (a-z, A-Z) and numeric (0-9) characters (non-ASCII characters are not allowed)

  • Special characters: period (.), underscore (_), hyphen or dash (-), at sign (@), apostrophe ('), percent sign (%), slash (/), or exclamation point (!)

    Because the user ID is part of the calid, the user ID should not contain spaces (for example, j smith). While a user with a user ID that contains a space can log into Calendar Server, the space can cause subsequent problems.

    Examples of proper calendar ID's are:

    jsmithjsmith:private_calendar
    jsmith@calendar.sesta.com:new-cal

Converting Non-Hosted calid's to Hosted Domain Format calid's

If you have calid's that were created before you had hosted domains, and you now want to convert the non-hosted domain calid's to hosted domain calid's, there is a utility, csvdmig, that can be used to add the domain part to your existing calids. See csvdmig for instructions on how to use the utility.