Unfortunately, there is not yet a seamless way to get your Oracle Calendar data into the native iPhone calendar app. I’ve tried many ways, only to get frustrated and end up going back to adding events manually to iCal.

There is a commercial iPhone App called “Todo+Cal” that talks directly to Oracle Calendar. The downside is that it is a stand alone app and doesn’t have alarms to alert you when you have a meeting coming up. If you are anything like me, you need these little reminders as you get lost in the world of code and pixels.

A little closer…

The latest version of “Todo+Cal” has a feature that allows you to export your calendar to an .ics file and upload it to a WebDAV server. Since we use Webfiles at UCI which is built on WebDAV, it suddenly becomes possible although still a bit clumsy. Todo+Cal also has the limitation of having to manually synchronize. This requires that you login to get the latest calendar data. I emailed Todo+Cal’s support and they sent the following reply regarding auto synching.

Again, Apple makes this [ auto synching ] hard. We could only implement automatically sync while the Todo+Cal application is open – because Apple does not allow background activity. We’re considering that, but it might not help too much because usually people won’t have the Todo+Cal app open all the time but use other apps in between, and then the automatic sync would not work.

Setting Up  Calendar (Reminder) Export

Before you begin, you will need to have a copy of Todo+Cal and set it up to connect to your UCI Oracle account. OIT has directions to help you. You will also need a Webfiles account or access to another WebDAV server. These instructions use Webfiles.

1. Make sure you have the latest version of Todo+Cal installed.
2. Launch Todo+Cal on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
3. Click on the Preferences button.
4. Scroll down to Calendar (Reminder) Export
5. Under Export, select reminders
6. Under Export future events for, select the number of days you want to export. This ranges from 7 – 30 – 90 days.
7. Under WebDAV, type in https://webfiles.uci.edu/<your UCInetID>/ocal.ics
   (Replace <your UCInetID> with your actual UCInetID. You can name the .ics file anything you like. This is just a descriptive short name I chose, but it must end in “.ics”.)
8. Under WebDAV user name, type in your UCInetID
9. Under WebDAV Password, type in your UCInetID password
10. Once configured, Todo+Cal will export your events with reminders to Webfiles. If it fails, you will get a warning message after a few seconds.

Importing Your Calendar into your iPhone or iPod Touch

1. Launch the Settings App on your iPhone
2. Scroll down to Mail, Contacts, Calendars
3. Tap Add Account
4. Tap Other
5. Tap Add Subscribed Calendar
6. Enter in the Webfiles address you created in the steps above. It should be something like: https://webfiles.uci.edu/<your UCInetID>/ocal.ics
7. In the Subscription screen, enter in your UCInetID in the Usename field and your password in the Password field.
8. Type “Oracle Calendar” in the Description field if you prefer a shorter name for the is calendar. (Optional)
9. Tap Next and then Save

Launch your Calendar App and you should now have your Oracle Calendar data in your native Calendar App.

Note, you will need to launch ToDo+Cal and Synchronize to pull down new data. Also, this is a one-way synch in that you cannot write directly to Oracle Calendar from the Calendar App. You can however, in Todo+Cal.

It’s still not an ideal solution, but is a bit closer.