Why use widgets rather than XML?
Most people need basically the same types of widgets. So rather than everyone building their own, Web Services does it for them. We have direct access to query the database for events that have changed. In addition, widgets are static content and do not pull data every time a person accesses a web page.
Why limit XML data requests?
XML is generic data that is dynamically pulled; it is not static. There are server costs for us when users pull data, therefore we limit the number of simultaneous web requests. If the limit is reached an HTTP 503 error code is sent along with a message.
Do we provide a way for importing events?
No. The Calendar is intended to be used as a marketing tool, and it is often used by stakeholders who have no marketing background. As such, robust calendar management--choosing appropriate and consistent tags, event types, location and sponsor information, etc.--is essential to the success of events. In other words, we don't want people just dumping their events into the calendar system.
How can we avoid entering events more than once?
We recommend having individuals enter events into our calendar system. Then, pull the events out using the XML web data feeds so that you can integrate them back into your calendar system. Since we ask users for more information than most calendar systems, you have more control over how events appear within your current calendars.
The calendar XML schema can be found here:
calendars11.xsd
How to receive notifications of service changes?
All changes made to this service are posted to ccsp@lists.illinois.edu. When we alert people to new changes we will already have the new enhancements available on our test server domain at https://test-calendars.webservices.illinois.edu . All new changes are pushed to production four weeks after we announce the enhancements.
How do you do specific searching?
Using the "search" tab from the public calendar web interface you will notice that there are many web parameters used when searching.
search
EventType
KEYWORDS
startDate
endDate
Below is an example of searching based on a start date and end date. You will notice that the slash that separates the elements of a date are HTML escaped with %2F. You will also notice that the month and day are always two numbers:
Schema 1.1
https://calendars.illinois.edu/eventXML11/7.xml?startDate=07%2F01%2F2015&endDate=07%2F23%2F2015
Any of these parameters can be added to the web query "/calendar/eventXML/#.xml" in order to filter the results. The web parameter "searchEventType" can be used more than once.
How do you specify date ranges in a web query?
Generating events, like all data processing, has CPU, memory and other types of costs associated with it. So in order to provide reasonable services we only provide up to 100 events per query. The recommended strategy for getting events is to query based on a date range. Most people query all events within a month. If you find that there are less than 100 events then you have the whole month. Else do one query for each week in the month. If you find that any particular week contains 100 queries then do one query for each day within that particular week.