Make calendar link for search results an iCal link

[kaitlin]

Love the little calendar icon in the search results but I wanna click it so bad... https://fbopen.gsa.gov/?q=enterprise+software+development&show_closed=on&data_source=&naics=&parent_only=&p=

Do people still use iCal? I dunno, just a suggestion.

[aaronsnow]

This turns out to be surprisingly non-trivial to hand-code. There are some plugins. https://github.com/kbwood/icalendar and https://github.com/tardate/jquery.addtocalendar look promising, although both appear not to be maintained anymore. http://addthisevent.com/ looks especially nice ($70 or free depending on whether we count as a "non-profit").

[polastre]

Midas uses the iCalendar node package to provide webcal calendar entries that companies like Google and Apple can update automatically. I highly recommend it.

Our code is here, in the iCal function: https://github.com/Innovation-Toolkit/midas/blob/master/api/controllers/EventController.js#L152

[NoahKunin]

If you go with AddThisEvent, thankfully the creator didn't restrict free usage to non-profits, but to non-commercial use. They just used non-profits as an example. Since FBOpen is not a commercial endeavor [ :one: ] , you're in the clear.

But for future reference, the government is not a non-profit. Most gov lawyers I speak to seem to concur that fundamental to the concept of non-profits is that they are private entities. So regardless of the lack of profit making enterprise or that we don't pay taxes to ourselves, we cannot be a formally recognized non-profit.

:one:: I've read some lawyers that think the government is inherently a commercial enterprise. I believe that to be an absurd and fringe position.

[marks]

I'm not an expert on this but I do know that in order to serve a file, we'll need a server which the sample-www/ folder does not include and I didn't want to break that part by implementing this.

What I have done in the commit that follows is created a very generic API endpoint that creates a simple ICS file. For example, http://localhost:3000/v0/ics?uid=0&start=20140704&end=20140705&title=Independence%20Day&description=&location=Washington%20DC works. This should be fairly trivial to hook up to the sample-www code however I did not do this since I wasn't sure if people were OK with ICS code making it into the API.

This is just one way (of many) of going about this feature request.