iCal not showing meeting time slot for organizer

Question

I have to send a meeting invite for the team and here's my ical

$ical =    'BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:'.$from_address.'
DTSTART:'.$dtstart.'
DTEND:'.$dtend.'
LOCATION:'.$meeting_location.'
SEQUENCE:0
UID:'.$cal_uid.'
DTSTAMP:'.$todaystamp.'
DESCRIPTION:'.$meeting_description.'
SUMMARY:'.$subject.'
ATTENDEE;RSVP=TRUE:mailto:[email protected]
ORGANIZER;[email protected]:mailto:[email protected]
PRIORITY:5
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR';

Ended up like

$from_name  = "John";
$from_address   = "[email protected]";

$result = sendIcalEmail($firstname,$lastname,...(something)...$message);

It is working fine for all the recipients.

I have added the user of from mail id to the senders list too which is the organizer mail id ([email protected]) so that he too can receive the invite but when I open the ical file it is not showing the time slot for the organizer but for all the other users it is displayed.

What might be the reason which is causing the issue.

Thanks inadvance

Answer 1

The organizer of a meeting is not necessarily an attendee. For example, an administrative assistant may schedule a meeting on behalf of an executive without attending.

On the other hand, iCalendar has a ROLE parameter (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5545#section-3.2.16) to define the... role of a participant, and one of the possible values is "CHAIR".

So in practice, most clients end up putting putting the Organiser in 2 properties:

• as the ORGANIZER
• as an ATTENDEE with ROLE=CHAIR.

Now another aspect is that in the iTIP/iMIP design, the organiser is not supposed to receive an invitation as the organiser's calendar client is the one triggering the invite. So one can expect strange behaviour coming from this. See also ics not updating organizer calendar