I want to be able to search my Calendar database for the next instance of a calendar entry with a particular name in the event topic.
Ideally, I’d be able to trigger Alfred, choose a calendar search, and type a name and get results that are an ordered list of events with that name in the title sorted by date.
I don’t need to do anything with it, I just need to see the date of the next occurrence.
Does anyone know of a way to do that?
I’m sure I could create the list in shortcuts, and trigger that with Alfred, but I’m wondering if there’s an easier approach.
Have you tried the workflow here posted by Vero from Running With Crayons?
It is a file filter on the Calendar folder where your calendar entries should be stored.
Some people seem to have luck with it. However, I’ve given Alfred full permissions to my Calendar, and like some other users, I don’t get any results returned. There’s nothing showing when I debug it either, I just don’t get any results.
Standard file search also doesn’t return any results when I specify such searches to include Calendar events and include my Calendars Library folder; neither of which I normally have enabled. If I do the same search in Spotlight (I have a test event with a nice unique name of “Coconut”), it does then list the event. I’m not sure why Alfred is having trouble, and I’ve stopped short of forcing a cache rebuild at this point as I simply have no personal need for this workflow.
Should you have no luck with getting the above workflow to work, you could…
- Call a shortcut on the command line passing it your search term, have that do the find and then format the results into JSON for Alfred to use in a subsequent Script Filter.
- Use iCalBuddy to dump your calendar, and write a script to format the output into JSON for the Script Filter again.
However, the file filter looks like it would be by far the simplest and most efficient option … if you can get it to work.
Hope that helps.
My unautomated solution to this is to use a free copy of Raycast — it has the My Schedule command that lists your Calendar events from now… Once selected, you can filter this list by typing part of the title.
I’ve replaced the ⌘+Space bar to launch Racast rather than Spotlight and am much happier 
(and ⌃+⌘+Space bar with the Raycast Emoji picker).
Commands within Raycast can be assigned shortcuts or be called via a URL — e.g. raycast://extensions/raycast/calendar/my-schedule — I use that from within Keyboard Maestro to call up My Shedule then search for my Zoom meeting and then invoke Raycast to launch it directly.
@sylumer I saw that, but discounted it because it was 8 years old. I’ll try it and see.
@Ferrers I’m pretty committed to Alfred, but I could see myself setting up a keyboard shortcut to just call the My Schedule command in Raycast. (The best automation is no automation.)
If the cal workflow does not work for you and you are willing to fallback to something else, have you tried Spotlight?