What does "icalendar.publish" method do?

Question

In the icalendar gem's readme they have this example code:

cal = Icalendar::Calendar.new
cal.event do |e|
  e.dtstart     = Icalendar::Values::Date.new('20050428')
  e.dtend       = Icalendar::Values::Date.new('20050429')
  e.summary     = "Meeting with the man."
  e.description = "Have a long lunch meeting and decide nothing..."
  e.ip_class    = "PRIVATE"
end

cal.publish

What does the cal.publish method do? There is no documentation for it, and the source code only shows this:

def publish
  self.ip_method = 'PUBLISH'
end

That doesn't help—what does ip_method do??

If anyone could explain this, it would be a great help.

Answer 1

There is an optional_single_property method/hook, see Github code. This method sets the publish method (refers to iTip).

From maptiming.com:

The ‘methods’ are not explained in the iCalendar standard, but in the iTIP standard, and reading of this second standard clarified a lot. These are the supported methods as listed on page 8 of the standard:

PUBLISH: Used to publish an iCalendar object to one or more “Calendar Users”. There is no interactivity between the publisher and any other “Calendar User”. An example might include a baseball team publishing its schedule to the public.

RFC 5546 explains the iTip standard.

Another resource mentioned:

iCalendar used the method PUBLISH instead of REQUEST. Using REQUEST, it just brings up the calendar, while using PUBLISH imported it."