Generating and using Calendar (.ics) files from AT data
Hi all!
This has come up in a couple recent threads (and I was PMed on the topic) and I thought writing a summary collating all the information on this topic might be useful for future users.
You (yes, you!) can automatically format Airtable data into shareable and saveable .ics files. This isn't sharing a whole calendar, but rather discrete events. It requires a fairly straightforward Make.com automation, a bit of text file editing, and a file hosting platform integrated with Make (I know Google Drive and Dropbox work). Here's the overall Make layout
To start with you need to understand that a .ics file is just a plain text file formatted in a machine readable way. This blog post provides some specific instruction. In your desired Airtable base, you should make sure to have start time, end time, event title, event description, and an attachment field.
Create a Make scenario tied to that Airtable base (you can pick how it triggers). Then add the "Compose a String" tool, pasting in the .ics format text and adding relevant content (this thread is a perfect guide). From here, you have the makings of your .ics file. If you're proficient in Make, you can send out emails with it as an attachment from here, but what's supercool is bringing the file back into Airtable.
To do that, add a file hosting platform (my example here will be Google Drive) that Make can create files in. Set it to create files in a shared folder as text files.
Finally, add another Airtable integration that updates the same record as the initial trigger. In your attachment field, use the web content link from the Google Drive implementation, and name the file "file name.ics" which converts the text file to an .ics file. In the example below, my file attachment field is named ICS.
Now when that automation runs, it will automatically create and attach a .ics file of your record to your Airtable record. Then you can share that via automation email (see this thread for info on that, and this for potential issues) or make it downloadable on a calendar view (tip: logged in users can download attachments from a publicly shared calendar view, but not un-logged in users. They don't need to have specific read permissions though). If you come up with other ways to utilize this, it'd be awesome to hear about them!
To give credit where it's certainly due, much of this information comes from the above threads and posters (and you can see me puzzling out elements in this thread). Just thought this is a somewhat obscure but useful implementation, worth gathering all in one spot.
