[Google Calendar] Silence notifications when "Out of Office"

OS / software versions:

REPRODUCIBILITY: Always
OS VERSION: Latest & greatest at the time of writing / Vanha Rauma 4.4.0.72
HARDWARE: XPeria 10 II
UI LANGUAGE: German
REGRESSION: Perhaps

Prerequisites:

  • have a google calendar added to the phone & the relative google account
  • have a recurring calendar entry in a google calendar

Steps to reproduce:

  • Set the out of office on the gmail calendar

Expected result:
The calendar app on the phone should NOT notify events during the OoO (sound / visual notifications)

Current result:
Events are notified with audio & visually even tho the out of office is set

Just so I understand, you set the calendar entry category to OoO, and expect the device to react to that, wrt. notifications?

Are there any other apps out there that do that?

Because AFAIK this is not the function of marking an event OoO, it is rather to show this information to others, like on a Free/Busy view.

2 Likes

Also, please specify the version properly, bug reports age and this is relevant for debugging and tracking.

Updated with version info.
I dont see why this would be so impossible to implement?
If no other application does it, it would differentiate SFOS :slight_smile:
I do understand that userland is picky and riddled with traps; but at some point,
jolla will have to bite the (poisoned) usability apple…

EDIT come to think of it @nephros , this would then be a feature request more than a bug report…

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Oh I think it’s an interesting idea/approach. And certainly not impossible to implement.

But that attribute of an calendar entry is not supposed to have such an effect. I.e. it’s not intended to cause something like that.

I can see an app like Situations app doing that - in fact in theory there is already a similar function: it can react to a Calendar entries title and e.g. set Silent or DnD mode. (Ignoring for a moment that Situations doesn’t work very well at this time.)

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Hmm just because one’s out of office does not necessarily imply silent mode should be enabled tho…
that’s feeling more of a sledge hammer approach…
in fact, the notification originator is the calendar app; also the calendar app has the knoweldge about the status (which a thing like Situations would need to reimplement).

But, just my 2 cents here :slight_smile:

Another point of view (my 2 cents):
Outlook (at least web part) offers to remove all scheduled meetings when OoO is set. User can take it and thus simply get rid of concerned entries. If not, it is assumed user will consider each schedule event individually. Or none at all if one does not care about it.

So, I think this is not a bug but rather a feature request.

I must admit i dont have an outlook account.
I guess the behavior is the same for all mail / calendar providers (even tho MS is famous for setting their own standards).
Edit: indeed on Outlook it will automatically decline Send automatic (out of office) replies in Outlook - Microsoft Support

but is this then a bug from gmail handling or is it just the way gmail handles things…

Woa, woa woa.

There’s some very different things requested/suggested here.

There’s a conflict I think.
So the request that the client should not notify for events which have OoO defined in their properties, and should not change behaviour for other events.

Or is it that the notifications should not happen for any events firing during the time an event with OoO property is spanning?

Ah but that is a feature of a calendar authoring application, that’s a different thing from an application that receives events and notifies about them.
I.e. that modifies events, or the whole calendar, but not the behaviour of notifying about existing events.

Fully agree. I’ve pointed it out because I think the challenge is broader than just silencing some(?) notifications. Indeed, some parts of the solution might be out of the phone.

@nephros of course, the events that should’nt be notified / should be silenced are the ones pertaining the account (?) in question, and yes only those - I guess (for instance on gmail) the OoO is account wide, and as such, affects all the calendars linked to the given account…but for Outlook, it might be something else? And for another provider (Proton mail? Yahoo?) even more different…

Also, just to be clear, I wouldnt see it necessary for the app to modify any status; just “silence” (ignore?) the relative notifications for accounts / calendars that are marked as OoO (of course these should still appear in the calendar). NOTE : for this specific OoO use case , that is.

Thanks for clarifying I think I get it now.

I have looked around a bit, and one of the problems with this seems to be that there isn’t a standard that includes the notion of “out-of-office”: link.
OTOH that thread is old, there might be a de-facto standard (although with MS and G being the big players here, I doubt there is a common one).

Still let me rephrase the request like this:

Does that sound like the thing you wanted?
… which sounds simple enough but also feels like it could be a nightmare to implement.

But you also say:

I wonder if it would be almost as useful if - as we have the “Manage Calendars” UI in jolla-calendar already - there was an option to keep an account/calendar “active” there, but set it to OoO/silent mode.

Lets say manually for now, not triggered by any content of the calendar/account. So a setting that silences a calendar wrt notifications, but keeps it around for sync/display/editing etc.

So formally:

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I am not sure about the technical piping / details (am a n00b myself on caldav stuff!),
but yes it sounds pretty much that what you are proposing is matching the requirements for the
solution to this “bug” / feature.

About the non-standard part, I must admit I cannot help there either (the “account wide” above came
from my own realization that google sets the whole calendar as either OoO or not, really).

I have moved this topic to feature requests.

Hold on, having the calendar set to “silent” mode → does that require a user action on the phone side?
Cause having to set OoO both on my mail and on the phone, is waaaay too cumbersome (for providers like GMail I mean. I fully understand that other (providers) might not echo this status / not give the possibility to do so, and for them it could be a good fall-back)

Some years ago, I worked on a patch to be able to silence all calendar notification of a given account. My use case was that I had a share calendar with my wife but didn’t want the notification of her calendar. I didn’t finish it since I was not able to convince Jolla enough for inclusion.

Your case could use part of the patch with a bit of glue to detect the out of office status of the account and silence all calendar notifications for this account automatically.

That’s adding another use case to mine. I may restart working on this feature…

3 Likes

I can already see a case for when the OoO appointmet should have an alert: I have a dentists appointment and I add it to work calendar as OoO. If it has a reminder set that’s the thing the calendar should obey. I don’t think event “category” should override the alert/reminder setting.

Just my two cents, so now we have (grabs abacus) six cents!

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On the other hand, a doctors apointment is something i would personally not put in a work calendar (even if related to work).
Though there would be other x reasons to have alerts from work calendars even during OOO; some people only use work calendar for everything i guess :); but then, in that case the silencing should definitely not be mandatory.

About the OoO, most likely id add an “errands” entry in some work-related calendar with the OoO, where there would be - most likely - no notifications (as noone wants 100 notifications from all the colleagues always :slight_smile: ); the fact i go to the doctor and i am OoO at the office are separate things imo :slight_smile: (and maybe now i am nitpicking)

this is turning into an interesting discussion, lets keep adding cents!