Shortcut: new calendar appt... with invitee?

[majordouble]

Is it possible to make a shortcut that creates a new calendar event that also includes invites to designated recipients?

I’ve looked at the actions for Calendar.app, Fantastical, and Toolbox Pro… but did not see a way to include invitees on an appointment.

I’d be happy to purchase a third party app for this feature… it’s key to my workflow.

Thanks.

[sylumer]

I think that the case here still stands.

Inviting people to a calendar invite via Shortcuts

Currently I have a shortcut that allows me to create a calendar event based on date/time (from input) and contact data (from selection from Contacts). However, I do not see a way to add someone to the event I’ve created within Shortcuts. Is there a way I can do this with the email associated with their contact I have stored?

There’s nothing in Toolbox Pro for this that I can see, and even Scriptable only has read only access to attendees - presumably because attendees update the details.

Calendar invites are usually based around an exchange of a calendar event definition file with an e-mail. It is very often the mail client itself that makes it look more integrated - e.g. Microsoft Outlook can manage both e-mails and calendars together on an Exchange mail server; Gmail is tightly integrated to Google calendar.

But I suspect if you created an ICS file based on your event with the attendee details in it (ref. for those that want it) and then e-mailed it as an attachment to those attendees, it would work.

I’d probably start by creating an invite, getting the file, opening it in a text editor (it is a plain text data format), copying everything out, figuring out what I’d want to populate dynamically in Shortcuts, and then using that content with magic variables in a text action (maybe some additional looping too depending upon what was varying) to build the file. Save that out to iCloud, and then attach that to an e-mail acton set to deliver a covering mail to the proposed attendees; not forgetting of course to add it to my own calendar.

That’s untested, but should replicate what an e-mail client would be doing if you were creating an event manually.

Hope that helps.

[majordouble]

Very helpful thanks. Appreciate the RFC reference.

[Jorge_Mussa_Guerra_D]

Just so you know: it is now possible, as apple added it as a native calendar app shortcut action

[Iamkyahnie]

would it be okay to ask how you did it?

[sylumer]

It isn’t in the create event action as far as I can see, but it is available in the edit event action, so maybe try editing the attendees immediately after creating a new event to add those attendees to it - hopefully it will trigger the invitation distribution.

[majordouble]

Wonderful… found it!

Thank you.