Question

This is driving me nuts so I hope someone can help an Objective-C noob figure this out. Here’s the deal:

I’m developing an iPhone app using Titanium Appcelerator and I’m trying to create an add-on module in XCode that will allow me to send an event to the iPhone calendar. What I’d like to do is to calculate the date and time in terms of seconds since Jan 1, 2001 (GMT) and send it directly to calendar without having to mess with the string-to-date stuff that seems always to return the wrong time. To this point, I’ve not been able to get the integer into the event date fields, both of which are NSDate types.

Titanium takes arguments from Javascript and compiles it into object code, so I can call my “cal” object like this:

var startDate = 316367923;
var endDate = 316367923;    
var results = cal.newEvent(startTime,endTime)

. . . and this is how the “cal” object receives that call:

-(BOOL)newEvent:(id)args {
    id startDate = [args objectAtIndex:0];
    id endDate = [args objectAtIndex:1];
    ...

What I’m hoping to do get these integers into the event object:

EKEventStore *eventDB = [[EKEventStore alloc] init];
EKEvent *theEvent  = [EKEvent eventWithEventStore:eventDB];
...
theEvent.startDate = [[NSDate alloc] initWithTimeIntervalSinceReferenceDate: (int) startDate];
theEvent.endDate   = [[NSDate alloc] initWithTimeIntervalSinceReferenceDate: (int) endDate];

This compiles with no errors but causes my app to bomb nonetheless, so I’m figuring I’ve got something missing in my understanding. Any idea of where I’m going wrong?

Thanks,

Mark

Answer 1

Quite probably ‘args’ is an NSArray, hence startDate and endDate are objects, not literals. You probably want to do something like:

theEvent.startDate = [[NSDate alloc] initWithTimeIntervalSinceReferenceDate:[startDate intValue]];

If e.g. startDate is an NSNumber. Otherwise, check out the Titanium docs to find out the type of numbers passed in.