I was motivated to create a workflow for scheduling my common meetings by the podcast. However, for one of those meetings, a specific person is invited to it each time. In the Add New Event action, there is no option to invite, and no invite actions.
is there an alternative? I do have access to their calendar, so I could just add it, but I like the functionality of inviting them, rather than just adding it.
I’m in the same boat here. Not feeling like there’s a way to do this.
I have not yet found a way to automate this. You can of course open the calendar after the event is created and add the person - but the fastest solution will be copy and paste on a Mac most likely.
Calendar invites are just a set of data that can be transmitted using the usual e-mail protocols. Since they can be specified in plan text file formats, it can be automated without too much of an issue if you’re willing to craft the calendar entry file yourself.
When I sign up for webinars at work I almost invariably receive and ICS file that contains the details my e-mail client can use to add an event into my calendar. Setting some of the variations in file formats for file extensions and calendars in general aside, I’m going to assert that these are in the iCalendar format.
iCalendar has an RFC standards definition (RFC 5545) that sets out in great technical detail what can be included in the file. But the Wikipedia page linked above has some good simple examples and that’s all you should need to get started.
With the webinar invites I get, they are not specific to me and that’s fine. But the iCalendar file format does allow event attendees to be specified through the ATTENDEE property. Section 3.8.4.1. of RFC 5545 walks you through the use of ATTENDEE and includes examples.
My suggestion for the automation would be to use some boiler plate text and some variables in a scripting solution of your choice to create your own ICS file. Then (with more automation obviously), attach that to an e-mail and send it off to your would be attendees.
For Workflow specifically, you would just build the text, specify the file name and pass it in as an attachment for your e-mail. A couple of screen shots showing just the most basic example workflow are in the collapsed section below.
Hope that helps.
As Workflow has a .ics file after creating the event, it might be possible to edit that and add the data even… great idea!
Thanks for the replies. I’m going to give it a try and let you know how it goes!
