Sundial is a comprehensive & scalable calendaring system providing distributed authorship, information approval workflows, mass-personalization, development interfaces, registration management, and e-commerce within a mature security model.
At Columbia, Sundial powers the University Events Calendar as well as many other school, departmental, and group calendars.
Using Sundial's event retrieval interface, one is able to leverage Sundial's repository of events and generate a calendar specific to one's needs and interests.
Sundial offers a simple HTTP-based interface for the retrieval of event information. One may obtain information from Sundial by forming a request to the event retrieval interface. Using Sundial's event retrieval interface one can specify what events are to be retreived and how they are to be presented.
Note that variables passed to the event retrieval interface are specified as name/value pairs of the form:
name=valueand the pairings are separated by ampersands, &. No variables are required. Variable names are case-sensitive.
For more information about Sundial's event retrieval interface, please see the section "Event Retrieval Interface" of Sundial's documentation at the following URL:
http://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/docs/
On Columbia's web servers, one calls upon a cgi-script installed at the following URL:
http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/sundial/getThis "get" cgi-script forwards one's request to the University's calendar systems. The cgi-script may be used to 1) embed calendar generated content within a web page or 2) generate standalone web pages.
To utilize Sundial's event retrieval interface and embed a calendar within web pages, you simply need to do a server side include (SSI) within your page. To do so, insert a line similar to the following within an html file.
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/sundial/get?dateEnd=R60&brand=default&context=embedded"-->The above SSI would produce the following.
Documentation on the use of server-side includes on Columbia's web servers can be found at the following URL:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/webdev/ssi/index.html
Using a form, one may submit event retrieval interface variables to the cgi-script via a GET or POST mechanism go obtain a Sundial generated calendar.
It is recommended that one specify the standalone context in order to obtain a standalone webpage.
For more information about Sundial or the University Events Calendar please visit the following:
Columbia University Events Calendar
http://calendar.columbia.edu/