Events with multi line in description does not work

reyem · May 5, 2016, 9:52pm

I was successfully setting up the caldav binding to send item commands. Having in the description just one command, such as BEGIN: BEGIN:RGBControllerAll:50 successfully sets the dimmer to 50 percent. However, whenever I want to send multiple commands in one event description, there is a parse error in the log. For example

BEGIN:RGBControllerAll:0
END:RGBControllerAll:100

results in the following exception:

2016-05-05 23:10:00.009 [ERROR] [g.openhab.io.caldav.EventUtils:98 ]- invalid format for line: BEGIN:RGBControllerAll:0 END:RGBControllerAll:100

But in my CalDav client ( Apple iCal ) the lines show as 2 lines. I enter them with ctrl+Enter. Is there a known issue regarding compatibility of Apple iCal and CalDav add-on?

reyem · May 6, 2016, 6:59am

OK, found an interesting fact:
in Apple iCal:

Control+Return, this results in a Unicode line separator ( U+2028 ): http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2028/index.htm
Option+Return, will add a correct newline according to the caldav spec ( \n ), the characters backslash and n.

I assume now this will do the trick and make multiple commands working if entered via iCal ( I will verify this and update the post here). However, I wonder how end users can be prevented from this mistake.
I would suggest:
a) also support unicode line separators ( U+2028 ) in the caldav add-on
b) Introduce another command separator than newline. For example semicolon ( ; )

Added issue to github issues: https://github.com/openhab/openhab/issues/4355

btw. as information for compatibility. My caldav server is my Synology NAS. This seems to be compatible with the add-on as well.