IOS 13- Shortcuts Automation to create events with set calendar with a set 3rd party application- Timepage

Hello everyone … this is my first post and supper excited to join the community to learn and share. It’s amazing the power users can get at their hands with the power of shortcuts and I’m very interested to follow along during this process to learn myself on how to make interesting shortcuts.

Currently I was looking for a template to build off of that would assist me in creating daily events to a set calendar into a certain application.

When running shortcut I would love to see a day/date roll wheel allowing me to pick the same day or scroll wheel to following day or any set date. (I would like to see the corresponding day with date, if at all possible) Then after picking day/date … it would pop up a custom list created by me giving me bodypart options … I select Chest from the list, then an all day event is created in the calendar called “GYM” using the Timepage calendar 3rd party application.

To take it a step further, after I select the body part … it would ask me if I wanted to schedule another workout, selecting no, creates the event and stays in Timepage to view.
Selecting yes takes me back to the day/date picker where I can create another workout selection from list, prior to it creating initial one in calendar.

Any help or guidance is much appreciated.
HAppy that I was recommended this site as it seems to be loaded with beneficial information.

Glad you’re liking the forum, and fancy seeing you here :wink:.

I’ve put together a shortcut for you to try out, but there are quite a few notes and caveats for it.

  1. In lieu of no answers from existing Timepage users to this point, I will first of all point out that I don’t subscribe to Timepage, and so I can’t test it - at all. The shortcut may yet fail at the first as a result :man_shrugging:t2:
  2. Because I don’t have it, I’ve had to go with the URL scheme approach on this example. If it does donate Shortcuts actions, then I would hope it would be easy to put the appropriate ones into the shortcut in the appropriate places,
  3. It looks like it only supports their default, bespoke, subscription calendar, so other calendar shortcut actions are out; but if I’ve missed some compatibility there, then using standard calendar actions in Shortcuts would be advisable in place of the Timeline specific event adding I’ve included.
  4. The URL scheme documentation for Timepage is pretty bad - timepage://x-callback-url/add_event?x-success=<success callback url>&x-cancel=<cancel callback url>&<other regular parameters> … I kind of like my other regular parameters to not be guesswork.
  5. I couldn’t see any ‘regular parameter’ documented to allow an event to be specified as all day. But the &start and &end parameters used in an example for searching might work. If the rest of this gets anywhere close, you could explore building those using the selected date and concatenating with %2000%3A00 and %2023%3A59 respectively as URL encoded da start and end times.
  6. You mention creating an event called “GYM”. I’ve put the activity in the title instead. There looks to be an &location parameter that you could specify as the gym. If you wanted to add the activity in the notes of the event instead of the title, you would have to maybe try &note, &notes, &body, or divine some other parameter to be able to set that. Again I found the documentation that I could find inadequate on this front. You could also simply prefix the title with “GYM-” of course as a quick and easy compromise :wink:
  7. The shortcut should keep looping until you are done.
  8. You can just add to the main list to specify additional gym activities.
  9. You noted staying in Timepage when an event if created if you select no more events. That isn’t possible as by that time, according to your description the even would have been created and you would be (back) in Shortcuts for the question. There are two ways to deal with this. I’ve gone with just reopening Timepage to the last gym date selected. The alternative would be to batch up all of the events to be added and then processing them. That’s a bit more complicated to accomplish, and I’m not sure it would serve to give much, if any, benefit over the first approach.

So that’s everything I think, Very much a wild stab in the dark, and even then, probably with something very blunt and ineffective. But fortune favours the bold and all that. Walk it through, give it a try and let us know how you get on and if it gets you any closer.

Thanks a million. I will give it a run.
If at all easier we can use fantastical. I just have been on the fence with it since their latest subscription model.

I am still blown away how easy U make this seam. I spent two hours and a headache later trying to figure out the whole process and how it works but kept getting confused.

So I get a popup to set a date then ask me what muscle to workout, then launches Timepage. Data fills event and calendar but I have to manually select “done” and also toggle that it’s an all day event. Then it goes back to shortcuts and ask if I want to create another event, if I select yes duplicates above and again I still always have to select done for it to finalize in Timepage and select all day event.

When it asks if I want to add another event and I say No, it takes me to Timepage showing me the last scheduled day event was scheduled on.

So if Timepage is holding us back maybe it’s best to transition over to Fantastical to import these events.
I could always just use Timepage to view calendar.
Thanks again for this tremendous support, hopefully it didn’t take U that long.

Gym Schedule with Fantastical

Here is one U had made for me in the past.
Seems the same issue follows to fantastical that it won’t add event. I still have to select Add for it to save event.

Anyway to automate ?
Also can it ask if I want to add another event and if I select Yes, when it shows U list it takes away the muscle part that was already scheduled? :+1:t3:

It’s rather late here in the UK, so I can’t look at this today. But the following may be helpful in the interim.

  1. If you can use any calendar, take a look at the add event action in Shortcuts. If you are adding to a “base” calendar on your device, be it linked to iCloud, or Google, or whatever, the way you add it does not need to be via the same app as you view it, so you can take advantage of the standard actions to do this without the confirmations. Also, I’ve used calls to Fantastical with natural language before to add calendar events, and it doesn’t prompt me in any way to confirm. There may be something more for you to look into there.
  2. The basic structure of the first shortcut can be modified to use an input. If there is no input, the shortcut can initialise the list of all possible muscle groups. If and when it loops around again, you pass the list of muscle groups to it, but without the last added group. Then on the next pass through, the list of muscle groups is not initialised to the full list, but instead taken from the shortcut input. In addition, a check of how many groups are left to assign should be carried out before checking on looping around again as presumably when the last one is assigned, you always want to stop. Also on that final loop, you probably wouldn’t want to output a list to choose from at that point either as there is just one choice.

There’s a few extra hoops to jump through there and I’ve just run out of time tonight to whip something up that covers everything above.

TimePage Calendar Shorcut

This one seems to work as expected.
The changes I would like to see happen with this shortcut if possible.
Would U know a way to change this to just showing the actual day (mon/tues, etc and the date and no time? If I select just “date” then I loose the day of the week. (Mon,Tues,Wednesday) which is important to know.

Also,
After I select a body part from list, on the next repeat to schedule another event, can the previous body part I selected be excluded from the list?

And

Once i select, No to wanting to add anymore can time page show me wheek view instead of the day view?

Thanks in advance !!

Okay, so working with a shared calendar is an option.

Based on that, try - Gym 2. I’ve tested it without Timepage again, but otherwise it seems to run okay for me.

  1. It displays the day and date … you just have to ignore the time it’ll do nothing :wink:
    • I don’t know of a way to set the inbuilt native Shortcuts actions to do it without the time.
  2. It loops with a decreasing list.
  3. You can still stop whenever you like, but it will automatically stop once a single remaining item is assigned.
  4. On the last item it won’t ask you to select from a list, it’ll just ask you when you want to do it.
  5. At the end it *should* open the week view in Timepage containing the date of the last calendar entry you made. I’ve based this on the week number URL, but as before I can’t test this.

Hope that helps.

Steps 1 thru 4 work perfect.
Only issue is that on step 5, it is displaying 7 weeks from today, not current week view.

Anyone have the knowledge to make one small edit to this shortcut?
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1b0032d4f5ba4a7492f5d9e974508336

Currently it shows current day, if I choose to create another event can it scroll to the next day automatically and the same method for each new event.
So first event would pick today, 2nd event would pick tomorrow, 3rd event etc.
possible?
Thanks in advance for the continued support.

This might give you an idea how you can add a day each time through a loop.

You can then apply that to the increment ING you require. Either keep updating the original date by one, or add the number of times through the loop on each loop occurrence, to the original date.

Has anyone seen this error?
I created an event “back” for tomorrow then I select yes to add another event and I get this popup.
It does add my first event though.


Thanks in advance for the help.

That error message is pretty explicit as to the issue. Do you have any Run Shortcut actions in your latest shortcut where the action is either blank, or the name of s shortcut that does not match the name of any shortcuts you have?

It should be straight forward to track down.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/93cdb309dfae4be6a9dc87b8a9e20687

Hmmmm, just the same one I have been using then just started getting message… weird.

Have you changed the name of your Shortcut? From your linked Shortcut, the only place that you run another Shortcut is in the “Add another?” section, which appears to probably run the current Shortcut again.

Is this field populated in your Shortcut? If you have changed the name of your Shortcut, this command will no longer be able to find the Shortcut to run and will need updating to point to the name of the current Shortcut again.

(Have you, perhaps, restored the Shortcut from BART by @jim_sauer, for example, where the Shortcut name is appended with “.shortcut” when restored?)

Hope this helps,

Tony.

WoW thank you Tony … that’s was exactly the issue… I tapped on shortcut and I was able to add the correct shortcut in the field and now it is working as expected.
I thank you for taking the time to look into this and point out the silly mistake on my part !

No problem, glad it worked and you got to the bottom of what was happening.

Tony