I’m building an Office 365/SharePoint Online intranet site for a client and they wanted to show a list of the current day’s events from various calendars on the site, in a format like this:
| 8:30 a.m. | Staff Meeting | Room 103 |
| 10:00 a.m. | Training | Cafeteria |
| 3:30 p.m. | Retirement Party | Conference Room |
As you might now, you can’t use a normal CAML-query to retrieve calendar entries if you want to retrieve reoccuring events that happen within a given timeframe. (If the first instance of a reoccuring event happened outside the timeframe you queried, the event would not be retrieved, even if it had reoccuring events that happened during the queried timeframe.) The Content Query Web Part will not do the trick.
On projects past, I’ve simply created a web part with a custom CAML query that utilizes the DateRangesOverlap node, and installed that web part using a solution package. This being Office 365, that’s not an option. I could have created a sandbox solution containing the web part but that’s also not a preferred approach since Microsoft seems to be deprecating sandbox solutions. At the urging of Marc Anderson, I tried using his SPServices library.
The SPServices library is a JQuery library that accesses SharePoint web services. By attaching your library to a particular Office 365 SharePoint URL, you can retrieve list items using the SharePoint web service, then use them with JQuery. There’s a discussion thread about how to use SPServices to retrieve calendar entries. I decided to modify the file provided in that thread and use it. The main modification I needed was the ability to combine calendar entries from more than one calendar and show them in a common calendar. This meant utilizing a sorting function after entries from multiple calendars were retrieved so all entries would be listed in the proper order.
You can download my calendar.js file here. Once I had added the script to my site, I added the following lines of code to my page layout in the header:
<p><script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <br> <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.3/jquery-ui.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script><br> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery.SPServices/0.7.2/jquery.SPServices-0.7.2.min.js"></script><br> <script language="javascript" src="/Style Library/Scripts/calendar.js" type="text/javascript"></script></p>
<script type="text/javascript"> <div>$(document).ready(function (){ <br> CallSPServicesCalendar(https://[sitename].com/site1, "Calendar 1");<br> CallSPServicesCalendar(https://[sitename].com/site2, "Calendar 2");<br> $('div.calendarItem').sortElements(sortByDate);<br> if ($('div.calendarItem').length == 0) {<br> $("#calendarData").append("There are no events scheduled for today.");<br> }</div>
<div> });<br></script></div>
In the calendar.js file you’ll notice a section with Field nodes that get passed into the CAML query. You can modify this section to add your own fields if you have custom fields you want to retrieve and display.
In the body of the page, I added a div tag like this, and this is where the event information was added in the page:
<div id="calendarData"></div>
In the calendar.js file, you can modify the HTML that gets rendered for each calendar entry.