iPhone calendar EKEvent

Question

I am currently trying to create an iPhone calendar app. In order to make sure it syncs with the existing iPhone calendars, I am using the EKEvent toolkit.

However, the events I will be storing will have more properties than the ones EKEvent allows for- eg, my events will not just have title, details and the few other categories that are allowed for; they will also have themes, priorities...

Thus, when I load the EKEventStore every time my calendar starts up, this information will not be contained in the EKEvents that are loaded.

How can I associate this information to the existing EKEvents so that whenever my calendar is loaded, these additional properties are also loaded?

I would use the eventIdentifier but the iPhone documentation says that "If the calendar of an event changes, its identifier most likely changes as well." If I am reading this correctly, this means that I cannot consistently use eventIdentifier to identify an event..

Answer 1

I would use the notes property and set a string which you can parse later. Since EKCalendarItem is EKEvent's superclass some of the properties of EKEvent are inherited from EKCalendarItem . ( documentation here )

However, you can still 'set' notes on an EKEvent , even though notes is not a property of EKEvent anymore. (go figure)

So, from your question, I might set an integer for each of your additional (custom) properties, like so..

In the view controller code that creates the event: - set an integer for each of you custom options. (priority, theme, etc.)

int priority = 0;

    EKEvent *newEvent = [EKEvent eventWithEventStore:yourEventStore];

    [newEvent setCalendar:yourCalendar];

    if (priority == 0) {
        newEvent.notes = @"0"
    }

    newEvent.title = @"YourTitle";
    newEvent.startDate = yourStartDate;
    newEvent.endDate = yourEndDate;

    [youreventStore saveEvent:newEvent span:EKSpanThisEvent commit:YES error:nil];

Then if you want to check/convert the custom property, just check the notes of the event whenever you fetch them either using characterAtIndex or make a subString from the notes and compare that to another string.