Imagine you work at a package delivery company and are developing a system for automatically
assigning deliveries to your employees. Each of your employees has a work calendar in Google
Calendar and needs to know when and where to be for the next delivery. Previously, you had to
store an ID of an event in the internal deliveries database; otherwise you would not be able
to find and update calendar events when work assignments changed. But now you can simply use
the delivery ID as the ID of a corresponding event in Google Calendar. The complexity of
figuring out which calendar event matches which delivery entirely disappears. This opens up a
whole new set of integration options -- for example, when an employee declines the calendar
event, Google Calendar can notify you so that you can automatically reschedule the delivery to
someone else.
Try it out for yourself: just set the ID field when creating a new single or recurring event
via the Calendar API v3 and observe that it sticks! The IDs must still follow certain format,
but don’t worry -- it’s possible to represent almost any content in the ID by using base32hex
encoding.
Set up notifications for changes in your calendar
It’s also now possible to use the Calendar API to specify how you want to receive
notifications each time an event is added to a calendar or a guest responds to an invitation.
The different types of change notifications can be toggled separately, which means you can set
up different notification types for new events, changed events, canceled events, response
updates and daily agendas. These settings are available for each calendar in the CalendarList
collection.
If you are interested in using these new features, check out the Google Calendar API v3
documentation for Events
and CalendarList
to get started.
Lucia Fedorova is a Tech Lead of the Google Calendar API team. The team focuses on
providing great experience to Google Calendar developers and enabling new and exciting
integrations.
