Get Events from Google Calendar with "minTime" and "maxTime"

General
1

Hi at all,

I ran into an Issue with getting Events via the node-red-contrib-google Node.
It´s all set up well so far and works, but with one twist, here's the setup:

I have a global object called systime were i store some date data to reuse it for different applications.
it looks like this:
systime

As you can see there are two variables set "nowIso" and "inaweek" which are perfectly formatted as ISO date string as required by the Google API.

Now i trigger a function node with an Inject to perform an API request. like this:

systime = global.get("systime");
now = systime.nowIso;
inaweek = systime.inaweek;

msg.time =  {now: now, inaweek:inaweek};
msg.payload = {calendarId:"mycalendarID@googlemail.com", maxResults: "20"};
msg.payload.timeMin = now;
msg.payload.timeMax = inaweek;
return msg;

I use the msg.time for debugging purpose and see, that in msg.time i have the same needed ISO date strings.

but I do get following error from the Google node:

"Error: Bad Request"

.....
When passing the ISO date directly like:

systime = global.get("systime");
now = systime.nowIso;
inaweek = systime.inaweek;

msg.time =  {now: now, inaweek:inaweek};
msg.payload = {calendarId:"mycalendarID@googlemail.com", maxResults: "20"};
msg.payload.timeMin = "2020-04-13T16:31:21.649Z";
msg.payload.timeMax = "2020-04-20T16:31:21.649Z";
return msg;

it works totally fine and I totally can't figure out why!
please help an obvious blockhead...

2

Are you sure that the time values stored in context are strings and not Date objects (which the debug panel helpfully converts to visible ISO strings for you).

3

To check my hypothesis try

msg.payload.timeMin = now.toISOString();
msg.payload.timeMax = inaweek.toISOString();
1 Like
4

thank you for your fast reponse!
I absolutely am!
the string in the screenshot above is a sting, other wise it would appear in blue.
and typeof returns string as well.

5

Okay with your guess I however solved it, even if I tried it quite like that before.
I had to set inaweek to a timestamp.
when doing this in my function:

systime = global.get("systime");
now = systime.nowIso;
inaweek = systime.inaweek;
inaweek = new Date(inaweek);



msg.time =  {now: now.toISOString() , inaweek:inaweek};
msg.payload = {calendarId:"myCalendarID", maxResults: "20"};
msg.payload.timeMin = now.toISOString();
msg.payload.timeMax = inaweek.toISOString();
return msg;

it works! :man_facepalming:

pretty weird, it works with the ISO String of now, but not with the String from inaweek, that i formatted the exact same way?! is this, because it is a date in the future? are there any restrictions by JS, Node.js, NR?
e.g.

//today is 13.04.2020
// this works
now = "2020-04-13T21:55:20.119Z";
now = now.toISOString();                        //even if this obviously is an ISO

//this doesnt work
inaweek = "2020-04-20T21:55:20.119Z";
inaweek = inaweek.toISOString();
// this returns
// "Error: inaweek.toISOString is not a function"

anyway, i will have learned to generate a new dateobject everytime i work with future dates!
and thank you very much Colin, you pushed me over the edge :grinning:

6

If systime.nowISO is a string, as I think you are saying then the above would fail because toISOString() is not a function you can call on a string.

1 Like
7

thank you again, colin. there seemed to be a mistake of mine that i overlooked.
the solution is the following:

storing the ISO strings as before in my systime function,
comments for potential future Datefunction victims.

time = new Date();                                          // new date object

hour = time.getHours();                                     // extract the stuff
minute = time.getMinutes();
day = time.getDay();
date = time.getDate();
month = time.getMonth()+1;                                  // necessary because months are indexed 0-11
year = time.getFullYear();

nowIso = time.toISOString();                                // convert now to ISO string
inaweekstamp = Date.now()+604800000;                        // for inaweek timestamp + 7days in millisecs 
inaweek = new Date(inaweekstamp).toISOString();             // new dateobject from that and convert to ISO

var showhour;
var showminute;

if(minute < 10){
    showminute = "0"+minute;
}else{showminute = minute}
if(hour < 10){
    showhour = "0"+hour;
}else{showhour = hour}

global.set("systime",{"hour":hour,"minute":minute, "day":day, "date":date, "month": month, "year":year,"showhour":showhour, "showminute":showminute, "nowIso":nowIso,inaweek:inaweek});
node.status({text:"System Time: "+showhour+":"+showminute})

where now is safe, that nowISO and inaweek are ISO strings without a doubt

recall the variables anywhere else

systime = global.get("systime");
now = systime.nowIso;
inaweek = systime.inaweek;


msg.time =  {now: now, inaweek:inaweek};
msg.payload = {calendarId:"stebe41@googlemail.com", maxResults: "20"};
msg.payload.timeMin = now;
msg.payload.timeMax = inaweek;
return msg;
8

Personally I would do it the other way round, keep everything as Date objects (so you can do things like add a week or convert to local time or whatever) and only convert to a string when you need to, which won't be very often.

9

You are right in most cases. In fact I want to look up multiple Google cals which requests are triggered separately, so in my particular case, I want do do the toISOString() once per period centralized!
Thanks a lot!

10

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