Connecting the dots

MacOS stores calendars in ~/Library/Calendars. For reasons that I gather have to do with spotlight searches, each event is stored in its own ICS file.

Let’s say we have an event that we’re interested in and it’s stored in this ICS file:

38CFC480…7F.caldav/952A7703…72.calendar/Events/EB19D88D…24.ics

(I’m eliding big hunks of random string just to keep the line length reasonable.)

This is actually an event in a shared calendar that I’m subscribed to; a Google calendar in this case.

Stepping back a bit, 38CFC480…7F.caldav contains several calendars:

38CFC480…7F.caldav/0FE2F362…42.calendar
38CFC480…7F.caldav/6C42E33B…D6.calendar
38CFC480…7F.caldav/952A7703…72.calendar
38CFC480…7F.caldav/D6594B52…39.calendar
38CFC480…7F.caldav/EA45580D…33.calendar
Info.plist

In fact, one of them is my primary Google calendar and the others are all calendars to which I’m subscribed.

None of the .calendar directories contain any metadata; they just contain an Events directory full of .ics files. The Info.plist file in 38CFC480…7F.caldav is metadata about my primary Google calendar, not the one I’m subscribed to.

If I go digging around, I eventually find:

5CE21AE9…FC.caldav/Info.plist

(At the top level, where 5CE21AE9…FC.caldav is a sibling to the 38CFC480…7F.caldav directory.)

That is the metadata for the calendar to which my event belongs. I know this because I’ve looked at the event, I know what calendar it should be in, and I know that the metadata in 5CE21AE9…FC.caldav/Info.plist is about that calendar (and there’s no other calendar with that metadata).

There’s nothing else in 5CE21AE9…FC.caldav, just this metadata.

If I inspect the 5CE21AE9…FC.caldav/Info.plist, I find this key/value pair:

<key>Principal</key>
<string>38CFC480…7F</string>

So I can get from 5CE21AE9…FC.caldav to 38CFC480…7F.caldav, but I cannot find anything that connects to the specific 952A7703…72.calendar. (There’s nothing even vaguely useful in the actual .ics file, by the way.)

Does anyone have any idea how the MacOS calendar works out which of the calendars in 38CFC480…7F.caldav contains the events that are to be associated with 5CE21AE9…FC.caldav? Is it possible that 952A7703…72 is not a random string but is actually some kind of hash of something?

Clues most humbly solicited.

P.S. Happy π day!

P.P.S. [About 90 minues later.] The answer is that it’s all mapped out in ~/Library/Calendars/Calendar Cache which is an sqlite3 database. I still think I’ve probably written fewer SQL statements than I have fingers, but I’ve now worked out one more:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Calendars/Calendar\ Cache \
  "select ZUID,ZCOLORSTRING,ZTITLE,ZOWNERDISPLAYNAME from ZNODE \
   where ZISENABLED=1 and ZCHECKED=1"

That’s sufficient for my purposes.

I started this posting as a sort of “rubber duck” to help me figure out what I was over looking. And it worked, just not quite as quickly as I hoped.