Question

I’m building a thermostat that pulls its target temperatures from a Google Calendar. In doing so, I need to determine the event happening now in said Google Calendar. At present, I’m fetching the .ics file from Google and then parsing it with Python icalendar library.

I then iterate through every event in the calendar and test:

1. Is the event today?
2. Has the event started?
3. Has the event not ended?

After checking every event (assuming there are no overlapping events), I get one event where the answer is YES for all three questions. That’s the current event.

Is there a better way to do this? In particular, is there any way to avoid iterating through every event in the calendar?

Answer 1

You should use the Google Calendar API. You can ask it for the events within a certain period of time, and it’ll respond with some nice JSON that will give you the information. There’s even a Python client that will take care of translating your requests to and from JSON.

There isn’t a way of querying for the current event directly, but you can certainly give it a limited min and max time, so you’ll only have a small number of events to search through. If your events are regular and of predictable duration, you may be able to make it just give you one.

events = client.events().list(calendarId='primary',
                              timeMin='2011-12-22T09:00:00Z',
                              timeMax='2011-12-22T22:00:00Z').execute()