Kloudless Blog

Kloudless Unified APIs enable you to code once and integrate many

This post was written by our software engineer, Ryan Connor.

Finding an appropriate meeting time can take a lot of effort, even with just a few participants who have only a single calendar. Finding a meeting time that is sure to work for many participants with multiple calendars managed by several cloud services? Good luck!

Fortunately, Kloudless now helps you do just that. We are proud to announce that the Calendar Availability endpoint is online and ready to help your application find meeting times that work for any combination of user accounts and their calendars.

Using the Calendar Availability Endpoint

The Calendar Availability endpoint returns all available time windows among a set of calendars that match a specific meeting duration and desired time windows for the meeting. The endpoint also supports requests involving multiple calendars for multiple accounts.

To illustrate, imagine your app has 100 users who have two personal (Google) calendars and two work (Outlook) calendars for a total of four hundred calendars. One call to the Calendar Availability endpoint can retrieve available meeting times (if any) for all 100 users subject to all four of their calendars. Alternatively, you can retrieve available meeting times for just a subset of users and/or their calendars.

Kloudless seamlessly integrates with Google and Outlook Calendar behind the scenes—all you have to provide are Account IDs, Calendar IDs, a meeting duration, and time constraints. Let’s take a look at exactly how to do that.

Formatting the Request and Parsing the Response

Here are the details for the request and response format of the Calendar Availability endpoint based on our docs. You can scroll down further to see concrete examples.

Request Format

URL: https://api.kloudless.com/v1/accounts/{account_id,account_id,…}/cal/availability

Method: POST

Headers:

  • Authorization: Bearer [Token]
  • Content-Type: application/json

Body:

  • calendars: List of Calendar IDs. Uses the default calendar if empty. (Optional)
  • meeting_duration: ISO 8601 format for duration. (Required)
  • constraints: A dictionary of constraint keys and values. (Required)
    • time_windows: List of desired time slots with the following values.
      • start: ISO 8601 datetime format
      • end: ISO 8601 datetime format

Response Format

Headers:

  • Content-Type: application/json

Body:

  • time_windows: List of desired time slots with the following values.
    • start: ISO 8601 datetime format
    • end: ISO 8601 datetime format

The start and end times of each time_window in the response bookend (inclusively) the time periods in which all of the accounts are available given the constraints. Note that the times are returned in the GMT time zone, so you may want to convert to the time zone of your choice.

Concretely, if the response includes the “2 – 5 PM” time window and you wanted a 30-minute meeting, you can safely schedule the meeting to start and end at any time within 2 – 5 PM, inclusive (e.g., 2 – 2:30, 2:01-2:31, …, 4:29-4:59, 4:30-5:00).

Example Usage

Single account, two calendars specified

In this case, the requestor wants to find an appropriate meeting time for a one hour meeting during the 8 AM – 12 PM GMT+7 time window on either May 20, 2017 or May 21, 2017. The requestor is requiring one account as a participant in the meeting and further specifying two calendars from that account.

Note that the primary calendar within an account is automatically considered if no calendars are provided. But, if any calendars are provided, the primary calendar must be included to be considered. For example, if the primary calendar ID in this case is neither ra5werWRsZXQzLcRik5BudGltb6RwwUNnbWFpbC5jb21= nor fa2xvdWRsZXNzLnRlc3QudGltb3RoeUBnbWFpbC5jb20=, the primary calendar would be ignored when retrieving availability. To also consider the primary calendar, the requestor should provide it as a third calendar in the given calendar list.

The response indicates that any one-hour slot between either 9 AM – 11 AM GMT+7 on May 20, 2017 or 10 AM – 11 AM on May 21, 2017 works for the meeting. Of course, the desired meeting length is exactly as long as the boundaries of the second available time window, so there is only one slot that works on that date.

Multiple accounts, no calendars specified

Here, the requestor wants to find a time for a 45-minute meeting during the 8 AM – 5 PM GMT-3 time window on June 15, 2017. The requestor is requiring three accounts as participants in the meeting, and since no calendars are specified, is searching for availability based solely on each account’s primary calendar.

Note that you can pass time window start and end times in any time zone (and, in fact, differing time zones within the same request). Furthermore, the calendars to be searched on need not be in the same time zone as the constraints. The important point is that the times are passed as ISO 8601-formatted strings—Kloudless will handle the rest.

The response indicates that any 45-minute slot between 9 AM – 10:30 AM GMT-3, 0:45 AM – 1 PM GMT-3, or 3:30 – 5 PM GMT-3 on June 15, 2017 works for the meeting.

Looking to the Future

The Calendar Availability endpoint provides a simple way to coordinate meetings among multiple calendars and calendar accounts. Going forward, we will monitor usage of the endpoint and listen to your feedback to determine the best way to expand the endpoint’s functionality and flexibility. We already have some great suggestions for making the endpoint more customizable, including:

  • The start_times constraint. If the requestor provides start_times in addition to (or in lieu of) time_windows, the endpoint would return the subset of start_times that work as the start time for the meeting. Essentially, this lets the requestor ask “Which of these exact start times are OK for the meeting?”
  • The ​min_attend_percent constraint. Right now, a time window will only be included in the response if every given account is available in that window—that is, if one relevant calendar in one account is not available during a window, that account is not available and so that window is not returned. With the min_attend_percent constraint, a time window would be included if at least the specified percentage of accounts are available during that window.e
  • The work_or_personal constraint. The requestor could provide a work_or_personal argument to limit the times considered for work or personal hours. This could be especially useful when trying to coordinate across widely varying time zones. For example, a colleague across the world may technically be “available” for a meeting at the time the requestor desires, but that’s of little use if it’s 2 AM for that colleague!

Wrapping Up

We’re excited to rollout the Calendar Availability endpoint to the developers on our platform. What do you like about the endpoint right now, what questions do you have about it, and what do you wish it would do in the future? We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on Twitter, our developer forums, comments below, or at hello@kloudless.com.

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