Co-author – Srihari Ananda Kumar 

Google Calendar is a calendar service for time management and scheduling. You can use Google Calendar to organize your schedule, coordinate events with others, and get reminders about upcoming activities.

Building a flow in IBM App Connect with Google Calendar

Use App Connect to build flows that integrate with Google Calendar and other applications. The connector is displayed as Google Calendar on the App Connect User Interface (UI). 

To allow App Connect to connect to your Google Calendar account, you need to complete the connection fields that you see in the App Connect Designer Catalog page or flow editor.

For more information on connection fields, see How to use App Connect with Google Calendar.

Google Calendar objects

The following is the Google Calendar objects that can be run in App Connect.

Scenario 1: Create a Google Calendar event whenever an epic is created in GitLab

Consider this scenario where you use App Connect to create an event in Google Calendar whenever an epic is created in GitLab. In this example, the GitLab epic details are parsed to Google Calendar, and an invite gets sent to the intended attendees with the epic details.

Before you begin:

This template helps you send meeting invites to the squad members based on the GitLab epic created. The epic is created with a label to identify which squad members the invites must be sent to.

To use this template, ensure that a workbook is uploaded to Microsoft OneDrive that contains the squad member's information, such as the team member's name, team label, and email address. This will help filter the email address based on the squad’s label.

For example:

In this flow:

1. The flow is triggered whenever a new epic is created in GitLab.
   
   For example, a new epic ‘EPIC Google Calendar’ is created with the label ‘Codejiggers’, start date, and due date. 
   
   
2. For each GitLab epic with a label:
   1. The Microsoft Excel Online Retrieve rows operation retrieves the team information from the specified workbook in Microsoft OneDrive.
      
      For example:
      
      
      
      
      
   2.  A Set variable node is added to the flow to set the variable Attendees to each of the Microsoft Excel Online retrieve rows.
      
      
      
      
      
   3. A JSON Parser node from the App Connect toolbox is used to parse the Attendees information from a JSON string into JSON objects.
      
      
      
      
      
   4. The Google Calendar's Create event operation creates the event (meeting) based on the GitLab epic title and the Attendees, which contain the team members' email addresses for the specified team (label).
      
      Other required information is added as well in the event properties.
      
      For example:
      
      
      
      
      Note: You must specify the start and end time of the event (meeting).
      
      
      

To summarize, based on the squad’s name (the GitLab label), the attendee’s information is filtered from the Microsoft Excel Online workbook, and a Google Calendar meeting invite is sent. The meeting invite will contain information such as the title, start and end times, time zone, recurrence of the meeting, and so forth, based on the data set in the create event.

Resources

Try out our templates

You can view the following use cases in the Templates gallery in your App Connect Designer instance.

• Create a Google Calendar event whenever an epic is created in GitLab

  Template URL: https://{your-instance-id}/templates/Create%20a%20Google%20Calendar%20event%20whenever%20an%20epic%20is%20created%20in%20GitLab
  
  

You must enable the Designer AI features in your containerized environment in order to access the App Connect templates. For more information, see The preloaded IBM App Connect templates.

You can also import these use cases directly into your App Connect Designer. These templates are added to a public GitHub repository at https://github.com/ot4i/app-connect-templates/tree/cp4i-templates/resources.

For more information about the supported connectors, see App Connect Connectors.