Events automatically identified as birthdays

Anmeldedatum: 07.06.2021 Beiträge: 21 Wohnort: Kyiv, Ukraine

I did not understand how MPE distinguishes between "Birthday" and general "Recurrent event" in calendars, until I exported and imported some calendar entries today and found that it is done based on the "DESCRIPTION" field in VEVENT, which is shown as "Birth year" for birthdays and as "Additional" for other recurrent events. Whenever there are four digits and nothing more in that field, MPE treats the event as a birthday.
While it may seem a convenient mechanism, I believe that it also creates some problems (not really big problems, but still...). For example, there are people who are not on my contact list but I want to see their birthdays in my calendar. While I can add it as an event, it will not be shown as a birthday unless I put some four digits in the "Birth year", and if I do not know their actual birth year, I have to put _some_ four digits in that field. Otherwise, the event I create will be saved as simply a "Recurrent event", not as a "Birthday".
Are there any plans to change this behavior of MPE? For example, there is that "CATEGORIES" field under RFC5545, and it could be used by MPE to identify birthdays as birthdays.

Moderator Anmeldedatum: 19.04.2014 Beiträge: 15958

The topic is not new, Birthday without a year there will be no changes in this regard
Workaround: Simply enter a fictitious year, e.g. 1903 or 0000

Anmeldedatum: 07.06.2021 Beiträge: 21 Wohnort: Kyiv, Ukraine

icke1954 hat Folgendes geschrieben:

The topic is not new, Birthday without a year

First of all, thank you for those links to earlier topics. Before creating this one, I did some search, but, since I do not speak nor read German, I only checked the English part of the forum.
Second, I steel think that my question is a bit broader than what was discussed in those topics. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that all those discussions were based on the idea of contacts and their respective birthdays. What I meant here was rather about situations where I just create an event under "Birthday" category without even having the respective person on my contact list. For example, I know the date of birth of some well-known politician, and I want to see it in my calendar as a birthday (with that birthday cake icon Smile

), not just some event that happens annually.
Is my understanding correct that FJ is not going to implement VEVENT categories as such in calendars? Birthdays (without having them linked to contacts) are just one of possible categories; maybe somebody would include in their calendars, say, anniversaries of deaths of their friends and colleagues (maybe with a coffin or cross as a separate icon), etc.
On the other hand, there may be some situations where I would like to have, for whatever reason, a recurrent event which is not a birthday, with _some_ four digits as additional information. Now it is impossible to have such event _not_identified as a birthday, unless and until I add some space or whatever to those four digits.

Moderator Anmeldedatum: 19.04.2014 Beiträge: 15958

I understand you very well, but what speaks against entering a fictitious year, for example 1900?

Anmeldedatum: 07.06.2021 Beiträge: 21 Wohnort: Kyiv, Ukraine

icke1954 hat Folgendes geschrieben:

I understand you very well, but what speaks against entering a fictitious year, for example 1900?

Well, not a major issue, but, as I already said, there may be situations when one would like to have four digits as additional info for an event where those digits should not mean any year at all.
To make it short: the approach "4 digits in the respective field mean a year and also mean that the event is a birthday" is a working "dirty hack" in my view; I do not like it, but if it remains as it is, what can I do other than to accept it and to thank FJ again for this generally great software Smile

.

Moderator Anmeldedatum: 19.04.2014 Beiträge: 15958

OK, I understand your problem, but I don't know how to solve it?
Which date field should the birthday be based on without specifying the year?
You would then have to provide an additional option “Without year”.
Unfortunately, there is another reason why the year must be inserted in the 'Additional' field.
Many cell phone calendars do not support years that are very far back and would correct them if there was a change.

Anmeldedatum: 07.06.2021 Beiträge: 21 Wohnort: Kyiv, Ukraine

icke1954 hat Folgendes geschrieben:

Which date field should the birthday be based on without specifying the year?
You would then have to provide an additional option “Without year”.

Well, in my view, ideally birthday-type events should be identified as such _not based on any date field_.
Let us have a look at two events exported from MPE. This is a "Recurrent event":

Code:

BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Test recurrent
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240516
DURATION:P1D
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1
CLASS:DEFAULT
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
TRIGGER;VALUE=DURATION:-PT0M
END:VALARM
LAST-MODIFIED:20240516T094430Z
X-CALENDAR:My calendar@LOCAL/NULL;My calendar
END:VEVENT

And the other one is a "Birthday":

Code:

BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Test birthday
DESCRIPTION:2024
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240516
DURATION:P1D
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1
CLASS:DEFAULT
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
TRIGGER;VALUE=DURATION:-PT0M
END:VALARM
LAST-MODIFIED:20240516T094532Z
X-CALENDAR:My calendar@LOCAL/NULL;My calendar
END:VEVENT

As I already said in my first message in this topic, the only difference between them is that "DESCRIPTION:2024", treated by MPE as the birth year.
Instead, it could look like this:

Code:

BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:John the Tester's birthday
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240516
DURATION:P1D
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1
CLASS:DEFAULT
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
TRIGGER;VALUE=DURATION:-PT0M
END:VALARM
LAST-MODIFIED:20240516T094532Z
CATEGORIES:BIRTHDAYS
X-CALENDAR:My calendar@LOCAL/NULL;My calendar
END:VEVENT

If MPE would be able to treat that "CATEGORIES:" field, then in the user interface such event would be shown as an annual event on May 16, with a birthday cake or whatever birthday-related icon, etc.
In a similar way, events generated from those contacts who have a date of birth filled in, would also contain that "CATEGORIES:" field having "BIRTHDAYS" as its value, but instead of "Jonh the Tester" they would have the names of the respective contacts in "SUMMARY:" and maybe the birth year in "DESCRIPTION:", and they would be shown with the same birthday-related icon etc.

Moderator Anmeldedatum: 19.04.2014 Beiträge: 15958

OK, even though you probably don't need this, how is the age calculated?
Many other users would not be satisfied with your variant?!

Nevertheless, in my opinion it would be possible to also incorporate your suggestion additional.
This means a 4-digit number in the 'Additional' field will continue to be the year of birth.
I will consult FJ again on this, thanks for the suggestion!

Greetings icke

Anmeldedatum: 07.06.2021 Beiträge: 21 Wohnort: Kyiv, Ukraine

icke1954 hat Folgendes geschrieben:

OK, even though you probably don't need this, how is the age calculated?

For those who have the year indicated in some field (first of all, for contacts with the date of birth indicated), nothing would change fundamentally. In those cases where there is a birthday event without a year, it would be, well, just a birthday. I do have reminders in some other applications "John celebrates his birthday today", and when I see it, I sit down and send a message to John with my wishes etc., without knowing exactly how old that friend or acquaintance is.

Zitat:

Many other users would not be satisfied with your variant?!

I understand that every user has their own needs, wishes, feature requests, etc. Smile

That said, I believe that I am not the only one who would prefer to have birthdays treated as a real separate category of events, not just "something that has some for digits in some field".

Zitat:

Nevertheless, in my opinion it would be possible to also incorporate your suggestion additional.
This means a 4-digit number in the 'Additional' field will continue to be the year of birth.
I will consult FJ again on this, thanks for the suggestion!

Many thanks, icke!

Site Admin Anmeldedatum: 15.02.2006 Beiträge: 31518 Wohnort: Tirol

Sorry, the calendar database of the phone is not able to store categories so it will be not possible to use this field as Birthday flag

Informationen zum Datenschutz auf dieser Website