Item1841: CalendarPlugin does not allow SEARCH results as event list

The CalendarPlugin does not allow SEARCH results as the event list.

You can INCLUDE topics with hard-coded event information, but if you try to build the event information using SEARCH, the information will appear correctly on the page of events, but it will not be incorporated into the resulting calendar, regardless of format.

I looked into this a while back (probably over a year ago) and verified that the CalendarPlugin does not use the normal page building facilities and uses its own INCLUDE infrastructure. I tried to add in the evaluation of SEARCH using the conventional method, and disabled the INCLUDE code specific to the CalendarPlugin. However, this resulted in cases when INCLUDES would infinite loop, so I backed the hack out. Since then, I imagine things have changed in the structure of what should be called.

I want to do this because we maintain events in separate topics that include DataForms that specify the date, time, venue, etc. of the event. I want to be able to automatically include those events in the calendar without the manual step of encoding a hardcoded entry that can be INCLUDE-ed.

For sake of explanation, here is the search I am using:

%SEARCH{search="form.name='PromoForm'" web="Events" nonoise="on" type="query" nosearch="on" format="   * $percntDATETIME{\"$day $month $year\" date=\"$formfield(Date)\"}$percnt - $formfield(Title) -- $formfield(Program)  $formfield(Venue) ($formfield(EventTime)) [[$web.$topic][Detail...]]" order="formfield(Date)" reverse="on" excludetopic="EventTopicTemplate"}%

And the events are produced for the event list correctly, but they are never incorporated into the calendar because the CalendarPlugin inspects the topic directly, and therefore sees the SEARCH code before it is expanded.

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Had to fix this to support calendars generated by external agencies.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 30 Jun 2010